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i*<rs  lor-l  ii  irrl  li  ir: 


THE  DRAMA  AND 
THE  STAGE 


BY 

LUDWIG  LEWISOHN 


NEW  YORK 

HARCOURT.  BRACE  AND  COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,  igaa,  by 

HAKCOURT,    BKACS  AND  COMPANY,   INC. 


PRINTED  IN  THK   U.  B.  A.  ■¥     ' 

THK   QUINN    a    BODKN   COMPANY 

RAHWAY.    N.    J. 


College 
Library 

Prefatory  Note  L^S 

The  brief  essays  and  studies  that  compose  this  vol- 
ume are  desultory  only  in  appearance.  They  were 
written  on,  but  not  for  a  particular  day,  and  seek  to 
illustrate,  whatever  the  date  or  the  material,  a  theory 
of  both  the  drama  and  the  theatre  that  is  coherent  and 
that  is  profoundly  implicated  with  permanent  quali- 
ties of  life  and  art.  They  all  had  their  first  appearance 
in  the  Nation,  to  the  editor  of  which,  Mr.  Oswald 
Garrison  Villard,  I  am  indebted,  among  many  other 
things,  for  his  permission  to  reprint  them  here. 

L.  L. 


1052972 


CONTENTS 
I.   THE  NEW  DRAMATURGY 

PAGE 

The  Drama  and  the  Stage       ....  3 

The  Theatee:  Mythical  and  Real       .       .  6 

The  Critic  and  the  Theatre    .       .       .       .  12 

A  Note  on  Tragedy 19 

A  Note  on  Comedy 24 

On  Sentimental  Comedy  and  Melodrama     .  29? 

A  Note  on  Dramatic  Dialogue  .       .       .       .  353 

A  Note  on  Acting 40 


II.   THE  AMERICAN  STAGE 

Mr.  Belasco  Explains 

Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions 

Gorki  and  Arthur  Hopkins 

A  Modern  Chronicle  Play 

The  Tyranny  of  Love 

According  to  Sarcey  . 

Pity  and  Terror  . 

Susan  Glaspell    . 

An  Evening  at  the  Movies 

The  One-Act  Play  in  America 

The  Lonely  Classics  . 


47 
S3 
72 

78 
84 
89 

94 
102 
III 
116 
121 


vi 


Contents 


in.   CONTEMPORARIES 

The  French  Theatre  of  To-day 
The  German  Theatre  of  To-day 
Shaw:  Height  and  Decline 
The  Queet  Truth 
Barrie,  or  the  Silver  Lining 
Archer,  or  Loaded  Dice     . 
Somerset  Maugham  Himself 
Max  Reinhardt    . 


PAGE 

168 

184 
188 


IV.   ART,  LIFE  AND  THE  THEATRE 

A  Certain  Playwright 195 

Within  Our  Gates 201 

Play-making         ....       .       .       .     207 

Conversation        .       .       .       .       .,       .       .212 

Marionettes         .       .       .       .      ...      .       .218 

Toward  a  People's  Theatre     .       .,      .       .223 
The  Strolling  Players     .       .       .       .       .228 

Interlude      ........     232 

Oasis 237 

Underworld 241 


I 

Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 


The  Drama  and  the  Stage 

The  critical  observer  of  our  living  theatre,  to  be 
useful  at  all,  must  cultivate  good  humor,  patience  and 
tolerance.  To  great  humility  of  expectation  and  a 
gratitude  for  small  mercies  he  must  add  a  steadfast 
determination  not  to  be  taken  in.  For  the  theatre  is 
a  place  of  many  illusions,  the  home  of  over-eager 
minds  and  of  harsh  ambitions,  the  scene  of  an  alterna- 
tion of  blazing  splendor  and  of  bleak  despair.  No  one 
can  understand  the  theatre  who  sees  it  too  intently 
from  within;  no  one  can  serve  it  who  does  not,  as  it 
is  to-day,  hold  it  a  little  cheap.  Because  the  theatre  of 
to-day  is  being  killed — ^by  the  theatre.  This  mechan- 
ism which,  stripped  to  its  essentials,  is  but  a  wooden 
platform  sheltered  from  the  winds,  this  simple  thing 
placed  now  on  a  hill-side,  now  in  an  inn-yard,  now  in  a 
room,  has  become  an  end  in  itself.  Revolving  stages, 
subtle  lights,  elaborate  scenes  are  in  their  right  ordei 
beautiful  and  useful  things.  They  become  a  menace 
when  they  cause  it  to  be  forgotten  that  the  platform  is 
the  platform  of  the  eternal  poet  struggling  with  the 
mysteries  of  the  earth.  This  is  not  fine  language;  it 
is  the  plain  and  sober  truth.  But  who  will  admit  it? 
David  Belasco?     Or  the  hundred  mechanics  of  the 

3 


4  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

theatre  who  will  swear  to  you  that  John  Galsworthy 
may  be  a  dramatist  for  the  study  but  that  he  doesn't 
understand  the  theatre? 

As  if,  indeed,  there  were  anything  so  intricate  to 
understand!  But  this  trumped-up  technical  intricacy 
of  play-writing  is  the  bread  and  butter  as  well  as  the 
chief  pride  of  its  adepts — adepts  of  a  delusion  which 
they  uphold  to  save  their  trade  and  their  self-impor- 
tance. Learned  men  have  come  to  their  aid,  interpret- 
ing the  transformations  of  that  ancient  platform  as  the 
history  of  the  drama;  poets  have  abetted  them  by  inno- 
cent fear  and  wonder.  Yet  that  delusion  crumbles  at 
the  most  obvious  test.  On  the  stage,  as  it  is  to-day, 
we  have  seen  the  Medea  of  Euripides  and  the  Book  of 
Job;  we  have  seen  Everyman;  we  have  seen  Shake^ 
speare;  we  have  seen  Ibsen  and  Hauptmann,  Galswor- 
thy and  Shaw,  and  the  fantasies  of  Maeterlinck  and 
Dunsany.  Which  of  these  understood  that  mysteri- 
ous mechanism?  Which  of  them  had  that  esoteric 
sense  for  what  is  "of  the  theatre"? 

Let  us  have  done,  first  of  all  then,  with  this  verbiage. 

A  play  is  a  dialogue  which,  when  spoken  by  actors 
from  a  platform,  holds  the  minds  of  men  through  its 
culmination  toward  some  physical  or  spiritual  end. 

The  power  and  depth  of  that  sense  of  culmination  is 
the  measure  of  the  play's  dramatic  life. 

Any  dialogue  that  has  dramatic  life  can  be  acted  on 
any  stage. 


The  Drama  and  the  Stage  5 

A  bom  dramatist  can  write  drama  without  ever  hav- 
ing seen  a  theatre.  If  an  audience  refuses  to  hear 
him,  it  is  because  the  soul  of  his  work  is  alien  from 
that  audience's  collective  soul. 

The  popular  playwright  is  not  he  who  understands 
either  the  theatre  or  the  drama  best,  but  he  who  flat- 
ters men  most  and  disturbs  them  least. 

It  is  in  the  intellectual  character  of  the  audience, 
not  in  the  mechanism  of  the  theatre  or  the  technique  of 
writing  plays,  that  the  causes  for  the  condition  of  our 
stage  are  to  be  sought.  From  a  platform  you  cannot 
speak  to  one  man;  you  speak  to  many.  And  the  group 
is  always  less  intelligent,  less  flexible,  less  merciful  than 
the  individual.  The  hope  of  the  theatre  is  in  the  fact 
that  there  are  groups  and  groups.  A  group  has  been 
found  to  keep  Jane  Clegg  in  a  New  York  play-house 
for  many  consecutive  weeks.  But  since  the  commer- 
cial managers  seek  not  the  best  group  but  the  largest, 
the  staple  of  our  stage  is  sodden  melodrama  and  brain- 
less farce.  The  serviceable  critic  will  try  to  rally  the 
smaller  groups  and  sustain  their  contact  with  the  more 
civilized  enterprises  of  the  theatre. 


The  Theatre:  Mythical  and  Real* 

In  the  cities  of  the  East  and  of  the  West  Mr.  Gordon 
Craig  would  have  theatres  arise  that  are  also  temples. 
They  are  to  be  majestic  but  not  cold;  in  them  are  to 
blend  the  precious  glow  and  glint  of  gold  and  ivory 
and  jade.  Within  and  without  they  are  to  be  durable 
and  changeless  in  their  massive  beauty.  Upon  their 
stages  the  scenery  is  to  consist  of  wrought  and  carven 
S5mibols.  There  is  to  be  nothing  perishable,  nor  any- 
thing that  too  closely  recalls  the  perishable.  By  mel- 
low daylight  actors  from  whom  "all  weaknesses  of  the 
flesh  have  been  eradicated,"  wearing  masks,  or — since 
even  these  actors  are  but  a  concession — Uebermarion- 
ettes  are  to  perform  a  silent  and  universal  drama.  And 
Mr.  Craig  has,  no  doubt,  a  vision  of  faithful  multi- 
tudes streaming  upon  appointed  holy  days  to  these 
temples,  hushed  with  awe  and  wonder  before  the  splen- 
dor of  their  mysteries. 

Well,  Mr.  Craig  is  mistaken.  No  multitudes  would 
come  to  his  temples,  but  only  a  few  forlorn  and  feebly 
irritable  esthetes  and  reactionaries.  It  is  not  the  dura- 
bleness  and  lofty  beauty  of  his  theatres  that  will  keep 
the  multitude  away.    For  the  barbarous  multitude  will 

1  The  Theatre — Advancing.    By  Edward  Gordon  Craig. 

6 


The  Theatre:  Mythical  and  Real  7 

go  as  gladly  to  a  temple  as  to  a  barn  to  see  a  play. 
But  it  demands  a  play.  And  at  this  point  Mr.  Craig's 
beautiful  and  imaginative  vision  suddenly  exhibits  a 
staring  gap.  What  is  the  play  to  be  about?  Granted 
that  it  is  to  be  a  super-pantomime  acted  by  austere 
men  or  marionettes,  it  must  express  something;  it  must 
tell  something.  The  content  of  that  play,  so  far  as  Mr. 
Craig  permits  us  dimly  to  gather  and  infer,  is  to  sym- 
bolize by  imiversal  gestures  the  inner  mystery  of  what 
is  man  and  the  world  and  God.  But  in  order  to  sym- 
bolize that  mystery  in  art  so  clearly  and  universally 
that  men  shall  flock  to  his  vast  rituals,  the  dramatist 
must  first  have  solved  it.  And  his  solution  must  com- 
mend itself  to  all.  He  must,  in  other  words,  first  rees- 
tablish an  historic  condition  analogous  to  that  of  the 
thirteenth  century  in  which  the  eternal  mysteries  are 
held  to  have  been  finally  explained  and  in  which  sym- 
bolical embodiments  of  this  explanation  are  as  welcome 
in  the  market-place  as  in  the  sanctuary. 

Of  this  necessity  Mr.  Craig  is  quite  aware.  He  is 
thoroughly  consistent.  He  holds  that  "modern  life  is 
damnable,"  that  all  our  troubles  have  been  brewed  by 
the  Materialist  Fool,  that  what  we  lack  is  "belief  and 
the  power  to  worship."  He  thinks  that  a  mob  is  an  ugly 
thing  and  a  king  a  beautiful  one;  he  is  wholly  innocent 
of  the  desperate  materialism  of  his  own  thought.  "Hail 
once  more/'  he  exclaims,  "to  that  divine  arrogance 
which  knew  that  the  obedience  of  the  many  to  the  judg- 


8  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

ments  of  the  one  meant  happiness  to  the  mass  of  men." 
He  thinks  that  the  ancient  Hindus'  "love  of  loveliness 
and  sanity  sprang  from  their  love  of  obedience  to  their 
arrogant  rulers,"  and  that  if  we  can  but  revive  their 
awe  and  wonder  and  humility  on  earth  then  "States 
and  religions  will  arise  all  fresh  once  more  and  Man- 
kind will  again  be  happy."  It  is  the  old  and  amiable 
delusion  of  the  romantic  dreamer  who  dreams  an 
ordered  and  beautiful  and  hierarchical  world  with  him- 
self, of  course,  stationed  near  the  top  of  the  hierarchy, 
building  the  majestic  temples  of  his  vision,  and  never 
picturing  himself  as  one  of  the  obedient  multitude 
whom  it  pleases  him  to  imagine  hanging  upon  his  lips 
and  enthralled  by  the  authority  of  his  soul.  If  he  once 
did  that  his  gorgeous  vision,  pinnacles  and  all,  would 
fade  like  a  puff  of  smoke.  For  he  would  at  once  dis- 
cover in  his  own  heart  the  eternal  heretic  and  rebel 
who  has  but  to  arise  and  to  reflect  to  know  that  it  is 
the  essence  of  his  manhood  to  be  free.  Whatever,  then, 
may  be  Mr.  Craig's  gifts  as  a  scenic  artist  and  stage 
craftsman — and  they  are,  doubtless,  of  the  highest — it 
is  clear  that  his  theories  of  the  theatre  have  been  treated 
far  more  gravely  than  they  deserve. 

What  Mr.  Craig,  in  fact,  succeeds  in  doing  is  to 
leave  us  with  a  feeling  of  unwonted  tenderness  and 
charity  toward  that  actual  theatre  at  which,  for  the 
best  reasons  possible,  we  may  just  have  been  jeering. 
For  that  theatre,  more  in  some  countries  than  in  oth- 


The  Theatre:  Mythical  and  Real  9 

ers,  but  a  little  everywhere,  tries  to  fulfil  its  true  func- 
tion and  to  serve  mankind  in  its  appointed  way.  It  is 
the  way  of  all  art  which,  sometimes  aiming  after  the 
illusion  of  the  real,  sometimes  by  a  synthesis  of  the 
elements  of  experience,  clarifies  and  interprets  our 
world  for  us,  shows  forth  its  hidden  meaningfulness 
and  beauty,  and  thus,  by  persuading  the  individual  to 
rise,  through  the  contemplation  of  the  concrete,  to  a 
larger  vision,  takes  from  him  the  burden  of  the  pain 
and  confusion  of  life.  It  does  for  him  precisely  what 
the  creative  act  does  for  the  poet.  The  latter  transfers 
his  experience  to  the  objective  world  and  gives  it  form 
and  meaning.  He  then  sees  it  apart  from  himself  under 
some  eternal  aspect  and  is  free  of  its  tyrannies  and 
fears.  We  others,  contemplating  the  poet's  works  in 
the  study  or  on  the  stage,  are  liberated  by  them  and 
raised  above  ourselves  in  just  the  measure  in  which  they 
hold  and  interpret  human  experiences  that  we  too  have 
known  and  have  endured.  Hence  to  increase  the  dig- 
nity and  worth  and  appeal  of  any  art,  including  the  art 
of  the  theatre,  it  is  necessary  (whether  the  technical 
method  be  naturalistic  or  idealistic)  to  bring  it  ever 
closer  and  closer  to  the  concrete  realities  of  man's  strug- 
gle with  himself  and  with  his  world.  Mr.  Craig  wants 
to  create  first  a  new  mythology  and  then  a  new  ritual 
in  his  durable  theatres.  What  the  sane  friends  of  the 
theatre  desire  is  to  strip  it  of  those  remnants  of  the  old 
mythologies  and  rituals  that  still  so  often  make  it  a 


10  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

tawdry  and  a  shameful  thing.  Mr.  Craig  wants  a 
drama  of  faith.  Let  him  go  to  see  the  melodramas. 
There  he  will  find  fierce  tribal  faiths  and  age-long 
delusions  of  hatred  and  terror  still  at  their  ancient 
business  of  intolerance  and  persecution  and  self-right- 
eousness and  force.  There  he  will  learn  that,  if  he  were 
to  build  his  theatre-temples  in  his  new  order,  and  free 
spirits  were  to  build  still  other  theatres,  the  kings  and 
sacerdotal  managers  of  his  dim  shrines  would  soon  be 
at  their  old  tricks  of  burning  both  the  non-conformist 
and  his  house. 

The  problem  of  improving  or,  if  you  will,  reforming 
the  living  theatre  is,  in  truth,  neither  so  intricate  nor  so 
esoteric  as  Mr.  Craig  and  a  few  other  theorists  would 
have  us  believe.  The  theatre  on  the  Continent  of 
Europe  has  been,  for  rather  more  than  thirty  years,  in 
a  very  tolerable  condition.  In  no  city  of  any  consid- 
erable size  in  France  or  Germany  or  Austria  or  Switz- 
erland or  Holland  or  Scandinavia  has  a  season  gone  by 
without  many  adequate  representations  of  the  works  of 
the  modern  masters  or  a  few  dignified  and  intelligent 
revivals  of  the  classics  oi  all  countries.  For  a  variety 
of  reasons,  some  obscure  enough,  some  clear  to  any 
observer,  the  theatre  of  the  English-speaking  countries 
lags  behind.  The  immediate  practical  problem  is  obvi- 
ous: to  work  towards  a  condition  of  our  theatre  and 
its  audiences  in  which  Shakespeare  and  Sheridan,  Gals- 
worthy and  Shaw  will  be  as  gladly  and  as  widely  heard 


The  Theatre:  Mythical  and  Real         ii 

as  Moliere  and  Goethe,  Ibsen  and  Hauptmann,  Her- 
vieu  and  Schnitzler  are  heard  in  their  respective  coun- 
tries. That  problem,  assuredly,  will  not  be  solved,  it 
will  not  even  be  touched,  by  an  amiable  and  gifted 
mystic  who  flies  in  the  face  of  historic  processes. 


The  Critic  and  the  Theatre 

If  there  is  one  person,  we  are  often  tempted  to  as- 
sert, who  should  not  be  permitted  to  criticize  the 
drama,  it  is  the  dramatic  critic.  It  is  not  because  he 
commonly  fails  of  being  sensitive,  honest,  and  even 
learned.  It  is  because  his  profession  puts  him  in  a  false 
position.  Consider  for  a  moment  the  man's  task.  He 
must  be,  on  command,  in  a  receptive  mood  toward  the 
most  complex  of  all  the  arts.  But  his  receptivity  must 
be  controlled  from  the  start  by  a  conscientious  inner 
censorship  of  his  impressions.  He  sees  to  report  and 
enjoys  to  dissect.  The  wise  passiveness  which  is  the 
condition  of  fine  artistic  judgment  is  not  for  him.  He 
cannot,  like  the  critic  of  literature,  attack  his  document 
again,  reflect  and  reconsider,  and  correct  his  morning 
mood  by  his  midnight  one.  He  must  grasp  his  bright, 
brief,  transitory  pageant  at  once,  and  he  must  grasp  it, 
ideally,  with  the  imaginative  innocence  of  a  child,  the 
austere  detachment  of  a  philosopher,  the  rich  sympa- 
thies of  a  man.  For  the  poorest  play,  feeble  and  fool- 
ish though  it  be,  is  in  its  very  nature  plastic  vision, 
philosophy  and  life.  It  is  vision,  obviously,  through 
its  mobile  and  colorful  embodiment  on  the  stage;  it  is 

12 


The  Critic  and  the  Theatre  13 

philosophy,  since  every  dramatic  action  culminates  in 
an  ending  which  betrays  the  playwright's  attitude  to 
the  totality  of  things;  it  is  life  by  being  an  example  of 
an  art  of  imitation.  No  wonder,  then,  that  the  dra- 
matic critic,  jaded  by  his  round  of  enforced  apprecia- 
tion on  the  one  hand,  or  unable,  on  the  other,  to  keep 
so  many  psychical  balls  in  the  air,  either  hides  the 
nobler  part  of  him  and  deals  in  trenchant,  critical  de- 
tail, the  flash  of  wit,  the  exploitation  of  his  personality, 
or  that,  like  an  unskilful  juggler,  he  drops  the  balls, 
denies  their  existence,  and  flees  for  permanent  refuge 
to  a  theory  that  artificially  simplifies  the  art  he  con- 
templates and  reduces  his  function  to  something  more 
agreeable  with  mortal  powers.  Thus  we  have  brilliant 
comment  on  this  or  that  aspect  of  the  theatre,  but  com- 
ment that  is,  in  any  larger  sense,  quite  sterile.  Or  else 
we  have  learned  and  charming  and  urbane  exercitations 
upon  all  externals  of  theatrical  and  dramatic  history 
and  practice,  which  leave  the  core  of  the  matter  quite 
untouched.  We  have  Hamlet  with  the  critic  substi- 
tuting himself  for  the  protagonist;  we  have  Hamlet 
with  Hamlet  left  out. 

There  is  Mr.  George  Jean  Nathan.*  That  he  some- 
times makes  the  judicious  wince  and  often  makes  the 
fastidious  shudder  is  a  small  matter.  For  he  has  some 
of  the  qualifications  of  a  dramatic  critic  in  a  higher 
degree  than  any  other  American  contemporary.    He 

1  Comedians  All.    By  George  Jean  Nathan. 


14  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

has  an  unrivaled  knowledge  of  the  modern  stage,  a 
thorougli  impatience  with  sham  and  cant,  and  flashes 
— as  in  his  brief  note  on  the  artificial  play — of  the  most 
searching  insight.  But  because  sentimentality  and 
sweetishness  and  foolish  uplift  have  so  often  among  us 
masqueraded  as  serious  art,  he  has  huddled  everything 
^that  seeks  to  touch  the  soul,  the  genuine  as  well  as  the 
false,  into  one  basket  and  flung  that  basket  out  of  his 
back  window.  What  he  wants  is  intelligent  entertain- 
ment, plays  that  will  please  a  comfortable  and  discrim- 
inating man  of  the  world.  He  will  not  get  what  he 
wants,  and  much  of  his  fine  energy  will  have  been  spent 
quite  in  vain.  No  man  can  write  a  serious  play,  and 
show  men  and  women  acting  and  suffering,  except  upon 
spiritual  and  moral  terms,  except  with  attitudes,  opin- 
ions, and  principles  that  reveal  his  inmost  soul  even 
more  than  theirs  and  bind  the  playwright  and  his  play 
to  stern  and  fundamental  things.  The  drama  is,  quite 
literally,  what  Aristotle  called  all  poetry — more  philo- 
sophical than  history.  Do  (Edipus  Rex  and  Hamlet 
afford  intelligent  entertainment,  or — to  come  to  Mr. 
Nathan's  special  field — An  Enemy  of  the  People  or 
The  Weavers  or  The  Lower  Depths?  The  intelli- 
gently entertaining  play,  which  commonly  assumes  the 
form  of  polite  comedy,  is  the  product  of  small,  com- 
pact, untroubled  communities.  Such  the  vast  seethings 
of  the  world's  life  tolerate  less  and  less.  Mr.  Nathan, 
in  a  word,  has  no  patience  with  tinsel  and  paper  flow- 


The  Critic  and  the  Theatre  15 

ers.  He  finds  them  out  with  an  unerring  gaze  and  with 
a  cold  exuberant  enjoyment  reduces  them  to  pulp.  But 
the  theatre  cannot  be  helped  by  the  mere  exposure  of 
isolated  instances  of  hollowness  and  fraud,  even  though 
that  exposure  be  full  of  energy  and  wit  and  good  sense. 
'"''^As  the  pla)nYright  inevitably  reveals  his  special  percep- 
tion of  ultimate  values  in  his  plays,  so  the  dramatic 
critic,  speaking  of  those  plays,  betrays  the  road  of  the 
mind  upon  which  he  travels.  And  Mr.  Nathan's  pil- 
grimage, unless  we  mistake  him  grossly,  is — towards 
orchids.  He  wants  to  sit  quietly  in  his  aloof  and  faun- 
like elegance  and  glance  at  the  exquisite  form  and  glow 
of  the  petals  and  forget  annoying  things,  and,  through 
a  succession  of  such  experiences,  build  a  house  of  art 
in  which  he  can  be  secure  from  the  tyranny  of  the 
Puritan  and  the  contamination  of  the  mob.  But  never 
was  the  theatre  less  likely  than  to-day  to  become  a  gen- 
tleman's Paradise.  We  must  either  acquiesce  in  its 
present  sentimentality  and  gaudiness — and  that  a  man 
of  Mr.  Nathan's  sophistication  cannot  do — or  else  we 
must  cast  in  our  lot  with  the  world  process  and  seek  to 
bring  the  gravest  and  most  stirring  of  the  arts  nearer, 
in  its  true  character,  to  an  ever-increasing  number  of 
men — and  that  Mr.  Nathan  will  not  do.  Thus  it  comes 
about  that,  with  all  its  vehemence  and  strength  and 
veracity  in  detail,  Mr.  Nathan's  critical  structure  is 
built  of  fragile  materials  in  a  precarious  and  a  lonely 
place. 


l6  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

Professor  Brander  Matthews/  through  his  teaching 
and  writing,  through  his  unfailing  vivacity  and  accom- 
plished scholarship,  has  probably  done  more  to  touch 
the  minds  of  intelligent  people  with  a  vivid  interest  in 
the  theatre  than  any  other  living  American.  If  he  has 
not  helped  the  American  theatre  itself  as  powerfully 
as,  given  his  station  and  influence,  he  might  have  done, 
it  is  because  he  has  too  often  acquiesced  in  its  con- 
dition upon  a  somewhat  rigid  application  of  certain 
historical  analogies.  These  analogies  he  reiterates  in 
The  Principles  of  Playmaking.  Since  Shakespeare  and 
Moliere  were,  first  of  all,  successful  playwrights,  who 
made  an  immediate  appeal  to  the  audiences  of  their 
day,  Professor  Matthews  makes  such  an  appeal  the 
criterion  of  the  dramatist  of  all  ages.  But  Shakespeare 
and  Moliere  wrote  for  very  small  and  homogeneous 
audiences.  To  which  of  the  innumerable  audiences  of 
a  contemporary  metropolis,  it  must  be  asked,  shall  the 
young  dramatist  address  himself?  Whose  applause 
shall  decide  whether  he  makes  an  analogous  appeal  in 
his  own  time  and  place — that  of  the  audiences  of  some 
bed-room  farce,  or  of  the  Theatre  Guild?  And  how 
long  a  run  shall,  for  a  given  play,  constitute  its  test  of 
that  broad  popularity  which  we  rightly  grant  Shake- 
speare and  Moliere  on  the  score  of  a  few  perform- 
ances? Nor  is  it  always  true  to-day  that  the  "audience 
is  a  crowd  composed  of  all  sorts  and  conditions  of 

^Principles  of  Playmaking.    By  Brander  Matthews. 


The  Critic  and  the  Theatre  17 

men."  A  New  York  audience,  for  instance,  is  com- 
posed of  people  who  can  achieve  a  certain  standard  of 
dress,  who  can  risk — ^with  galleries  abolished  and  bal- 
conies restricted — ^two  dollars  on  an  evening's  enter- 
tamment  or  boredom,  who  belong  neither  to  the  great 
religious  communions  that  disapprove  of  the  theatre, 
nor  to  that  very  cultivated  minority  which,  in  its  pres- 
ent state,  disdains  it.  Hence  our  pla5rwright,  far  from 
being  obliged  to  "deal  with  subjects  appealing  to  col- 
lective human  nature,"  must,  for  immediate  success, 
cater  to  the  tastes  and  prejudices  of  a  narrow,  inflex- 
ible, commonly  over-fed  bourgeoisie,  desperately  fright- 
ened by  ideas  and  unfamiliar  modes  of  feeling.  Thus 
the  phrase  of  Moliere,  "to  please  the  public,"  has  little 
left  in  common  with  its  original  meaning,  and  every 
first-rate  modem  dramatist  has  had  to  help  destroy  the 
contemporary  theatre  as  he  found  it  in  order  to  be 
heard  at  all.  So  soon  as  we  grasp  the  true  nature  of 
these  conditions,  the  entire  theory  which  differentiates 
the  secondary  literary  qualities  of  a  play  from  its  pri- 
mary theatrical  ones  collapses.  To  the  right  audi- 
ence, once  it  be  found  and  gathered,  a  notable  drama's 
excellence  in  invention,  structure  and  style  will  consti- 
tute its  theatrical  effectiveness;  its  "veracity  of  char- 
acter" will  afford  all  needed  "histrionic  opportunities" 
— ^who  would  desire  opportunities  that  do  not  grow  out 
of  such  veracity? — and  its  truth  to  the  human  environ- 
ment with  which  it  deals  will  be  picturesque  enough. 


1 8  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

No,  it  is  not  acquiescence  from  which  the  most  fruitful 
criticism  can  arise.  Oiur  theatre  is  not,  so  far  as  it  is 
most  prosperous,  the  theatre  of  the  great  dramatists 
fallen  upon  evil  days.  It  is  the  theatre  of  a  class  and 
an  economic  condition  from  which  we  must  free  it  for 
the  service  of  nobler  and  more  human  things. 


A  Note  on  Tragedy 

It  has  been  said  many  times,  and  always  with  an 
air  of  authority,  that  there  is  no  tragedy  in  the  modem 
drama.  And  since  tragedy,  in  the  minds  of  most  edu- 
cated people,  is  hazily  but  quite  firmly  connected  with 
tlie  mishaps  of  noble  and  mythical  personages,  the 
statement  has  been  widely  accepted  as  true.  Thus  very 
tawdry  Shakespearean  revivals  are  received  with  a  tra- 
ditional reverence  for  the  sternest  and  noblest  of  all 
the  art-forms  that  is  consciously  withheld  from  Ghosts 
or  Justice  or  The  Weavers.  Placid  people  in  college 
towns  consider  these  plays  painful.  They  hasten  to 
pay  their  respects  to  awkward  chantings  of  Gilbert 
Murray's  Swinburnian  verses  and  approve  the  pleasant 
mildness  of  the  pity  and  terror  native  to  the  Attic  stage. 
The  very  innocuousness  of  these  entertainments  as 
well  as  the  pain  that  Ibsen  and  Hauptmann  inflict 
should  give  them  pause.  Pity  and  terror  are  strong 
words  and  stand  for  strong  things.  But  our  public 
replies  in  the  comfortable  words  of  its  most  respectable 
critics  that  tragedy  has  ceased  to  be  written. 

These  critics  reveal  a  noteworthy  state  of  mind. 
They  are  aware  that  tragedy  cuts  to  the  quick  of  life 
and  springs  from  the  innermost  depth  of  human 
thinking  because  it  must  always  seek  to  deal  in  some 

19 


20  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

intelligible  way  with  the  problem  of  evil.  But  since  it 
is  most  comfortable  to  believe  that  problem  to  have 
been  solved,  they  avert  their  faces  from  a  reopening 
of  the  eternal  question  and  declare  that  the  answer  of 
the  Greeks  and  the  Elizabethans  is  final.  They  are 
also  aware,  though  more  dimly,  that  all  tragedy  in- 
volves moral  judgments.  And  since  they  are  unaccus- 
tomed to  make  such  judgments,  except  by  the  light  of 
standards  quite  rigid  and  quite  antecedent  to  experi- 
ence, they  are  bewildered  by  a  type  of  tragic  drama 
that  transfers  its  crises  from  the  deeds  of  men  to  the 
very  criteria  of  moral  judgment,  from  guilt  under  a  law 
to  the  arraignment  of  the  law  itself. 

Macbeth  represents  in  art  and  life  their  favorite 
tragic  situation.  They  can  understand  a  gross  and 
open  crime  meeting  a  violent  punishment.  When  as 
in  King  Lear,  the  case  is  not  so  plain,  they  dwell  long 
and  emphatically  on  the  old  man's  weaknesses  in  order 
to  find  satisfaction  in  his  doom.  In  the  presence  of 
every  tragic  protagonist  of  the  modern  drama  they  are 
tempted  to  play  the  part  of  Job's  comforters.  They 
are  eager  to  impute  to  him  an  absoluteness  of  guilt 
which  shall,  by  implication,  justify  their  own  moral 
world  and  the  doctrine  of  moral  violence  by  which  they 
live.  The  identical  instinct  which  in  war  causes  men 
to  blacken  the  enemy's  character  in  order  to  justify 
their  tribal  rage  and  hate,  persuades  the  conventional 
critic  to  deny  the  character  of  tragedy  to  every  action 


A  Note  on  Tragedy  21 

In  which  disaster  does  not  follow  upon  crime.  Yet, 
rightly  looked  upon,  man  in  every  tragic  situation  is  a 
Job,  incapable  and  imconscious  of  any  degree  of  volim- 
tary  guilt  that  can  justify  a  suffering  as  sharp  and  con- 
stant as  his  own. 

Thus  modem  tragedy  does  not  deal  with  wrong  and 
just  vengeance,  which  are  both,  if  conceived  absolutely, 
pure  fictions  of  our  deep-rooted  desire  for  superiority 
and  violence.  It  is  inspired  by  compassion.  But  com- 
passion without  complacency  is  still,  alas,  a  very  rare 
emotion.  And  it  seeks  to  derive  the  tragic  element  in 
human  life  from  the  mistakes  and  self-imposed  com- 
pulsions, not  from  the  sins,  of  men.  The  central  idea 
of  Ghosts,  for  instance,  is  not  concerned  with  the  sin 
of  the  father  that  is  visited  upon  the  son.  It  is  con- 
cerned, as  Ibsen  sought  to  make  abundantly  clear,  with 
Mrs.  Alving's  fatal  conformity  to  a  social  tradition  that 
did  not  represent  the  pureness  of  her  will.  Her  tragic 
mistake  arises  from  her  failure  to  break  the  law.  The 
ultimate  and  absolute  guilt  is  in  the  blind,  collective 
lust  of  mankind  for  the  formulation  and  indiscriminate 
enforcement  of  external  laws. 

To  such  a  conception  of  the  moral  world,  tragedy 
has  but  recently  attained.  That  both  the  critical  and 
the  public  intelligence  should  lag  far  behind  is  inev- 
itable. Every  morning's  paper  proclaims  a  world  whose 
moral  pattern  is  formed  of  terrible  blacks  and  glaring 
whites.    How  should  people  gladly  endure  the  endless 


22  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

and  pain-touched  gray  of  modern  tragedy?  They  un- 
derstand the  Greek  conception  of  men  who  violated  the 
inscrutable  will  of  gods;  they  understand  the  renais- 
sance conception  that  a  breach  of  the  universal  moral 
law  sanctioned  and  set  forth  by  God,  needed  to  be  pun- 
ished. They  can  even  endure  such  situations  as  that 
of  Claudio  and  Isabella  in  the  terrible  third  act  of 
Measure  for  Measure.  For  that  unhappy  brother  and 
sister  never  question  the  right  of  the  arbitrary  power 
that  caused  so  cruel  a  dilemma,  nor  doubt  the  absolute 
validity  of  the  virtue  that  is  named.  These  two  strike 
at  each  other's  hearts  and  never  at  the  bars  of  the  mon- 
strous cage  that  holds  them  prisoner.  Do  they  not, 
therefore,  rise  almc»t  to  the  dignity  of  symbols  of  that 
moral  world  in  which  the  majority  of  men  still  live? 

But  it  is  precisely  with  the  bars  of  the  cage  that 
modern  tragedy  is  so  largely  and  necessarily  concerned. 
It  cannot  deal  with  guilt  in  the  older  sense.  For  guilt 
involves  an  absolute  moral  judgment.  That,  in  its  turn, 
involves  an  absolute  standard.  And  a  literally  abso- 
lute standard  is  unthinkable  without  a  super-human 
sanction.  Even  such  a  sanction,  however,  would  leave 
the  flexible  and  enlightened  spirit  in  the  lurch.  For  if ' 
it  were  not  constantly  self-interpretative  by  some 
method  of  progressive  and  objectively  embodied  reve- 
lation, its  interpretation  would  again  become  a  mere 
matter  of  human  opinion,  and  the  absoluteness  of  moral 
guilt  would  again  be  gravely  jeopardized.    Not  only 


A  Note  on  Tragedy  23 

must  God  have  spoken;  He  would  need  to  speak  anew 
each  day.  The  war  has  overwhelmingly  illustrated  how 
infinitely  alien  such  obvious  reflections  still  are  to  the 
temper  of  humanity.  We  must  have  guilt.  Else  how, 
without  utter  shame,  could  we  endure  punitive  prisons 
and  gibbets  and  battles?  Is  it  surprising  that  audi- 
ences are  cold  to  Ibsen  and  Hauptmann  and  Galswor- 
thy, and  that  good  critics  who  are  also  righteous  and 
angry  men  deny  their  plays  the  character  of  tragedy? 
But  the  bars  of  the  absolutist  cage  are  not  so  bright 
and  firm  as  they  were  once.  The  conception  of  unre- 
lieved guilt  and  overwhelming  vengeance  has  just 
played  on  the  stage  of  history  a  part  so  monstrous  that 
its  very  name  will  ring  to  future  ages  with  immitigable 
contrition  and  grief.  And  thus  in  the  serener  realm  of 
art  the  modern  idea  of  tragedy  is  very  sure  to  make  its 
gradual  appeal  to  the  hearts  of  men.  Guilt  and  pun- 
ishment will  be  definitely  banished  to  melodrama, 
where  they  belong.  Tragedy  will  seek  increasingly  to 
understand  our  failures  and  our  sorrows.  It  will  ex- 
cite pity  for  our  common  fate;  the  terror  it  inspires 
will  be  a  terror  lest  we  wrong  our  brother  or  violate  his 
will,  not  lest  we  share  his  guilt  and  incur  his  punish- 
ment. It  will  seek  its  final  note  of  reconciliation  not 
by  delivering  another  victim  to  an  outraged  God  or  an 
angry  tribe,  but  through  a  profound  sense  of  that  com- 
munity of  human  suffering  which  all  force  deepens  and 
all  freedom  assuages. 


A  Note  on  Comedy 

The  pleasure  that  men  take  in  comedy  arises  from 
their  feeling  of  superiority  to  the  persons  involved  in 
the  comic  action.  The  Athenian  who  laughed  with 
Aristophanes  over  the  predicament  of  the  hungry  gods, 
the  contemporary  New  Yorker  who  laughs  over  a  come- 
dian blundering  into  the  wrong  bedroom,  are  stirred  by 
an  identical  emotion.  The  difference  in  the  intellec- 
tual character  of  the  two  inheres  in  the  nature  of  the 
stimulus  by  which  the  emotion  is  in  each  case  aroused. 
In  the  former  the  pleasure  was  conditioned  in  a  high 
and  arduous  activity  of  the  mind;  in  the  latter  it  arises 
from  a  momentary  and  accidental  superiority  of  situ- 
ation. High  and  low  comedy  are  dependent  in  all  ages 
upon  the  temper  of  the  auditor  whose  pleasurable  emo- 
tion of  superiority  must  be  awakened.  He  who  has 
brought  a  critical  attitude  of  mind  to  bear  upon  the 
institutions  and  the  ways  of  men  will  cooperate  with 
the  creative  activity  of  a  faculty  which  he  himself  pos- 
sesses and  has  exercised;  he  to  whom  all  criticism  is 
alien  can  evidently  find  no  causes  for  superiority  within 
himself  and  must  be  flattered  by  the  sight  of  physical 
mishaps  and  confusions  which,  for  the  moment,  are 
not  his  own.    Pure  comedy,  in  brief,  and  that  comedy 

24 


A  Note  on  Comedy  25 

of  physical  intrigue  which  is  commonly  called  farce, 
cannot  from  the  nature  of  things  differ  in  the  effect 
they  strive  to  produce.  But  they  must  adapt  their 
methods  of  attaining  this  common  end  to  the  character 
of  the  spectator  whose  emotions  they  desire  to  touch. 
It  follows  that  pure  comedy  is  rare.  Historically  we 
find  it  flourishing  in  small,  compact,  and  like-minded 
groups:  the  free  citizens  of  Athens,  the  fashionables 
of  Paris  and  London  who  applauded  Moliere  and  Con- 
greve.  But  in  all  three  instances  the  reign  of  pure 
comedy  was  brief,  and  in  the  latter  two  precarious  and 
artificial  at  best.  With  the  loss  of  Athenian  freedom, 
intrigue  took  the  place  of  social  and  moral  criticism; 
no  later  poet  dared,  as  Aristophanes  had  done  in  The 
Acharnians,  to  deride  warlikeless  in  the  midst  of  war. 
In  the  New  Comedy  public  affairs  and  moral  criticism 
disappeared  from  the  Attic  stage.  In  Rome  there  was 
no  audience  for  pure  comedy.  Its  function  was  exer- 
cised by  the  satirists  alone,  precisely  as  a  larger  and 
nobler  comic  force  lives  in  the  satires  of  Dryden  than 
in  the  plays  of  Congreve.  Nor  should  it  be  forgotten 
that  Moliere  himself  derives  from  a  tradition  of  farce 
which  reaches,  through  its  Italian  origin,  to  Latin  com- 
edy and  the  New  Comedy  of  Greece,  and  that  the 
greater  number  of  his  own  pieces  depends  for  effective- 
ness on  the  accidents  and  complications  of  intrigue. 
When  he  rose  above  this  subject  matter  and  sought 
the  true  sources  of  comic  power  and  appeal  in  L'Ecole 


26  Toward  a  New.  Dramaturgy 

des  Femmes  and  Tartuffe,  he  aroused  among  the  un- 
critical a  hatred  which  pursued  him  beyond  the  grave. 

The  modern  theatre,  which  must  address  itself  pri- 
marily to  that  bulwark  of  things  as  they  are,  the  con- 
tented middle  classes,  is,  necessarily,  a  bleak  enough 
place  for  the  spirit  of  comedy.  These  audiences  will 
scarcely  experience  a  pleasurable  feeling  of  superiority 
at  the  comic  exposure  of  their  favorite  delusions. 
Hence  Shaw  is  not  popular  on  the  stage;  a  strong  comic 
talent,  like  Henri  Lavedan's,  begins  by  directing  its 
arrows  at  those  grosser  vices  which  its  audience  also 
abhors  and  then  sinks  into  melodrama;  isolated  excep- 
tions, such  as  the  success  of  Hauptmann's  massive 
satire  of  bureaucratic  tyranny  in  The  Beaver  Coat, 
scarcely  mitigate  the  loneliness  of  comedy  on  the  stage 
of  our  time.  The  comic  spirit  which  once  sought  refuge 
in  satire  now  seeks  it  in  the  novel — that  great,  inclusive 
form  of  art  which  can  always  find  the  single  mind  to 
which  its  speech  is  articulate. 

But  since  men  still  desire  to  laugh  in  the  theatre, 
there  has  arisen  out  of  a  long  and  complicated  tradi- 
tion the  sentimental  comedy.  Here  the  basic  action  is 
pseudo-realistic  and  emotional.  Into  it  are  brought, 
however,  odd  and  absurd  characters  whose  function  is 
the  same  as  that  of  Shakespeare's  Fools  in  tragedy. 
They  break  the  tension  and  release  the  pleasurable 
feeling  of  superiority.  More  often,  however,  they  en- 
croach largely  on  the  sentimental  action,  and  then  we 


A  Note  on  Comedy  27 

have  the  most  popular  form  of  theatrical  entertain- 
ment among  us — a  reckless  mixture  of  melodrama  and 
farce.  And  this  form  caters,  beyond  all  others,  to  its 
huge  audience's  will  to  superiority.  Men  and  women 
laugh  at  the  fools  whom  they  despise,  at  the  villains 
whose  discomfiture  vindicates  their  peculiar  sense  of 
social  and  moral  values;  they  laugh  with  the  heroes  in 
whom  those  values  are  embodied  and  unfailingly  tri- 
umphant. 

From  such  facile  methods  pure  comedy  averts  its 
face.  It,  too,  arouses  laughter;  it,  too,  releases  the 
pleasurable  emotion  of  superiority.  But  it  demands  a 
superiority  that  is  hard  won  and  possessed  by  few.  It 
is  profoundly  concerned  with  the  intellect  that  has  in 
very  truth  risen  above  the  common  follies  and  group 
delusions  of  mankind;  it  seeks  its  fellow^ip  among 
those  who  share  its  perceptions  or  are  prepared  to  share 
them.  It  demands  not  only  moral  and  intellectual  free- 
dom in  its  audience;  it  demands  a  society  in  which 
that  freedom  can  be  exercised.  It  cannot  flourish,  as 
the  central  example  of  Attic  comedy  illustrates,  except 
in  a  polity  where  art  and  speech  are  free.  And  any  one 
who  reflects  on  the  shifting  panorama  of  political  insti- 
tutions will  realize  at  once  how  few  have  been  the  times 
and  places  in  history  in  which,  even  given  a  critically 
minded  audience,  the  comic  dramatist  could  have 
spoken  to  that  audience  in  a  public  playhouse. 

The  immediate  example  in  our  own  period  is  that 


28  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

of  Bernard  Shaw.  Whatever  the  ultimate  value  of  his 
plays  may  be,  he  is  to  us  the  truest  representative  of 
the  comic  spirit.  Some  of  his  plays  have,  on  occasion, 
quite  frankly  been  removed  from  the  stage  by  the 
police  power;  none  are  truly  popular  except  in  the 
study.  The  bourgeois  audiences  who  at  times  witness 
their  performance  have  set  up  between  themselves  and 
Shaw  the  protective  fiction  that  he  is  a  high-class  clown. 
Since  they  cannot,  in  self-defense,  laugh  with  him, 
they  attempt  to  laugh  at  him,  and  thus  save  their 
pleasure  and  their  reputation  for  cleverness  at  once. 
True  comedy,  in  a  word,  is  a  test  both  of  the  inner 
freedom  of  the  mind  and  of  the  outer  freedom  of  the 
society  in  which  men  live.  Its  life  has  always  been 
brief  and  hazardous.  Nor  is  it  likely  to  flourish  unless 
the  liberties  of  mankind  are  achieved  in  a  new  meas- 
ure and  with  a  new  intensity.  For  the  great  comic 
dramatist,  if  he  would  gain  the  most  modest  success, 
must  gather  in  a  single  theatre  as  many  free  minds  in 
a  free  state  as  Lucian  or  Swift  or  Heine  seek  out  and 
make  their  own  in  a  whole  generation. 


On  Sentimental  Comedy  and  Melodrama 

In  sentimental  comedy  the  purpose  of  clouds  is  to  have 
a  silver  lining.  The  silver  lining  is  carefully  "planted" 
from  the  start  and  in  the  last  act  irradiates  the  visible 
horizon.  It  is  a  perfectly  open  secret;  the  playwright 
would  fare  ill  who  refused  to  play  the  game.  The  pub- 
lic will  endure  physical  but  not  moral  suspense.  It 
likes  to  be  puzzled  to  know  how  the  crooked  will  be 
set  straight.  Indeed  the  crooked  must  not  be  crooked 
in  its  real  being  at  all.  The  clouds  must  be  delusions. 
Straightness  and  radiance  must  be  seen  as  the  normal 
order  of  the  world.  And  this  normal  order  must  be 
reestablished  and  rendered  clear  by  a  half-humorous, 
half-sentimental  character  of  native  birth.  This  is  the 
hero  of  sentimental  comedy — a  rough  customer,  pref- 
erably, but  with  a  heart  of  gold,  clean,  wholesome, 
manly,  chivalrous,  the  sworn  foe  of  libertines,  foreign- 
ers, revolutionaries,  grafters,  scientists,  idlers.  .  .  . 

Is  there  anything  that  imites  all  heroes  of  senti- 
mental comedy?  Perhaps  it  is  their  common  convic- 
tion that  virtue  is  a  definite  and  simple  thing,  that  it 
is  not  to  be  found  among  the  wise  and  learned,  that  it 
need  but  be  discerned  to  transform  life,  and — that  it 
pays.    A  curious   blending  of  the  spirit  of  the  Gospel 

29 


30  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

with  that  of  the  Enlightenment,  of  ancient  sayings  con- 
cerning the  wisdom  of  the  foolish  with  those  verses  in 
which  Edward  Young  declared  that 

All  vice  is  dull, 
A  knave's  a  fool. 
And  Virtue  is  the  child  of  Sense. 

It  follows  that  in  this  art  of  the  theatre,  if  in  no 
other,  we  cultivate  prettiness  and  are  afraid  of  beauty. 
How  entrancingly  pretty  our  leading  actresses  are! 
Miss  Billie  Burke  has  an  exquisite  childlikeness.  Miss 
Laurette  Taylor  a  liquid  pathos  of  expression,  Miss 
Elsie  Janis  a  boyish  freshness  and  grace.  Beauty  is 
a  thing  almost  from  another  world.  It  would  not  so 
swiftly  reveal  itself  to  so  many  eyes.  It  arises  from 
deeper  sources.  It  brings  not  only  peace  but  also  a 
sword.  Neither  in  life  nor  in  art  will  prettiness  burn 
the  topless  towers  of  Ilion.  Genius  and  beauty  hold 
a  menace  and  a  flame.  Talent  and  prettiness  delight 
and  soothe.  One  might  almost  achieve  them  oneself! 
Such  is,  unconsciously  enough,  the  reaction  of  our 
wider  audiences.  The  managers  and  stage  directors 
are  equally  at  ease.  Their  ways  are  ways  of  pleasant- 
ness. Miss  Burke  is  not  fretting  to  play  Electra,  Miss 
Taylor  is  content  not  to  appear  as  Lady  Macbeth,  Miss 
Janis  dances  like  an  elf,  but  she  does  not  insist  on 
dancing  the  tarantella  of  Nora  Helmer. 


On  Sentimental  Comedy  and  Melodrama     31I 

So,  by  a  happy  and  tacit  conspiracy,  pretty  plays — 
all  sentimental  comedies — are  found  for  these  pretty 
stars — plays  in  which  they  can  wear  charming  clothes 
and  have  their  lovely  innocence  of  aspect  safely  as- 
persed by  dark  doubts.  No  moral  discomfort  will  arise 
from  such  plotting.  You  know  from  the  first  that  Miss 
Burke  and  Miss  Taylor  are  as  harmless  as  they  are 
pretty.  They  are  irremediably  sweet.  Beauty  may 
dwell  with  guilt  and  bitterness  and  wisdom,  knowing 
the  earthly  and  the  heavenly  love.  When  Miss  Burke 
and  Miss  Taylor  let  down  their  hair,  you  think  of  the 
nursery;  beauty  with  the  same  gesture  evokes  a  vision 
of  the  ancient  night  lit  by  its  burning  stars.  A  whole 
dramaturgy  of  the  pretty  could  be  derived  from  such 
reflections,  and  it  is  more  than  a  jest  to  point  out  that 
on  the  screen  actresses  who  approach  beauty  of  person 
or  expression  are  cast  for  the  parts  of  "vampires." 

If  prettiness  and  its  innocence  keep  our  dramas  from 
being  seriouS,  they  may  also  be  said  to  keep  our  farces 
from  being  amusing.  Throughout  its  history — and  it  is 
a  very  long  one — farce  has  aroused  laughter  by  pre- 
senting people  in  absurd  and  uncomfortable  predica- 
ments. Into  these  predicaments  the  characters  of  farce 
fall  by  committing  the  follies  and  excesses  to  which 
human  nature  is  addicted.  But  since  on  our  stage 
human  nature  must  be  shown  as  not  really  addicted  to 
these  at  all,  and  since  pretty  is  as  pretty  does,  our 
farces  are  anemic  and  clownish.    Our  actresses  are 


32  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

pretty  and  must  be  innocent;  the  men  may  be  silly,  but 
their  conduct  must  be  fundamentally  correct.  Thus 
the  eternal  contents  of  the  lower  human  comedy  which 
a  Moliere  did  not  disdain  are  reduced  to  a  game  of 
hide-and-seek  adorned  by  slightly  provocative  cos- 
tumes. Our  moral  illusionism  lies  at  the  root  of  the 
whole  situation.  We  like  to  think  of  ourselves  as  a 
nation  of  kindly,  proper,  good-looking,  romantically 
virile  people.  Between  the  mirror  of  the  stage  and 
ourselves  we  hold  up  for  reflection  that  comfortable 

and  sentimental  dream. 

*     *     * 

Melodrama,  it  is  commonly  held,  owes  its  character 
to  astute  plotting  and  to  moments  of  intensely  height- 
ened conflict.  The  briefest  observation  of  our  stage 
destroys  that  theory  at  once.  Our  average  melodrama 
is  structurally  stupid.  Its  continuance  depends  on 
some  trick  that  a  clever  child  could  see  through.  At 
some  crucial  moment  a  false  reticence  or  nobility  is 
feigned  and  the  action  rattles  ahead  for  want  of  three 
words  of  explanation  that  only  perversity  coupled  with 
dullness  could  have  withheld.  There  is  no  nimbleness 
of  invention  in  these  plays.  The  plots  are  monotonous 
and  heavy;  the  final  act  is,  as  a  rule,  openly  bankrupt 
of  ingenuity  or  resourcefulness.  Of  this  fact  the  audi- 
ences are  not  unaware.  It  is  possible  to  overhear 
jesting  comments  on  it  from  people  of  no  startling  intel- 
ligence.   Yet  these  people  will  go  again  and  again,  and 


On  Sentimental  Comedy  and  Melodrama     33 

melodramas  are — far  beyond  farce  or  sentimental  com- 
edy— the  safest  investments  of  the  commercial  man- 
agers. 

The  explanation  is  not  far  to  seek.  It  lies  in  the 
extreme  psychical  gregariousness  of  the  average  Amer- 
ican. Spiritual  isolation  has  no  bracing  quality  for 
him.  To  be  in  a  minority  makes  him  feel  indecent  to 
the  point  of  nakedness.  His  highest  luxury  is  the  mass 
enjoyment  of  a  tribal  passion.  War,  hunting,  and  per- 
secution are  the  constant  diversions  of  the  primitive 
mind.  And  these  that  mind  seeks  in  the  gross  mimicry 
of  melodrama.  Violence,  and  especially  moral  violence, 
is  shown  forth,  and  the  audience  joins  vicariously  in 
the  pursuits  and  triumphs  of  the  action.  Thus  its  hot 
impulses  are  slaked.  It  sees  itself  righteous  and  erect, 
and  the  object  of  its  pursuit,  the  quarry,  discomfited 
or  dead.  For  the  great  aim  of  melodrama  is  the  kill- 
ing of  the  villain.  Whether  he  be  tribal  enemy  or 
moral  or  social  dissenter,  he  is  permitted  small  suc- 
cesses, shadowy  evasions,  brief  exultations.  But  these 
are  known  to  be  momentary,  and  felt  as  rudely  ironic. 
The  net  tightens,  its  cords  cut  closer  and  closer  into 
the  victim's  flesh  until  the  magnificent  instant  of  the 
clicking  handcuff  or  the  whirring  bullet  is  ripe. 

Stronger  and  deeper  is  the  final  instinct  that  adds 
fierceness  and  joy  to  the  mimic  man-hunt  of  melo- 
drama. The  villain,  whether  tribal  enemy,  mere  for- 
eigner, or  rebel  against  the  dominant  order,  is  always 


34  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

represented  as  an  unscrupulous  rake.  He  attacks  the 
honor  of  native  women,  and  thus — especially  if  his 
skin  is  a  tinge  darker — there  is  blended  with  the  other 
motives  of  pursuit  the  motive  of  a  vicarious  lynching 
party  of  the  orthodox  kind.  The  melodrama  of  this 
approved  pattern  brings  into  mimic  play  those  forces 
in  human  nature  that  produce  mob  violence  in  peace 
and  mass  atrocities  in  war.  Nations  addicted  to  phys- 
ical violence  of  a  directer  and  simpler  kind  have  cul- 
tivated the  arena  and  the  bull-ring.  Those,  like  our- 
selves, who  desire  their  impulses  of  cruelty  to  seem  the 
fruit  of  moral  energy,  substitute  melodrama. 


A  Note  on  Dramatic  Dialogue 

Dramatic  dialogue  is  of  two  kinds.  In  the  older  and, 
it  has  often  been  thought,  nobler  kind  the  dramatist 
lends  the  characters  his  own  energy  and  beauty  of 
speech  and  they  are  differentiated  one  from  another 
primarily  by  the  sentiments  they  utter  and  only  sec- 
ondarily, if  at  all,  by  the  manner  of  that  utterance. 
Stylistically  the  speech  of  Jason  and  Medea,  Othello 
and  lago,  Alceste  and  Philinte  is  one.  Whether  such 
dialogue  be  written  in  verse  or  prose  does  not  affect  the 
method  involved.  Bernard  Shaw,  despite  an  occasional 
use,  as  in  certain  scenes  of  Major  Barbara,  of  the 
raciest  vernacular,  shares  with  his  characters  his  own 
wealth  of  energy  and  eloquence  and  wit.  Among  the 
Neo-Romantics  this  stylistic  unity  is  even  more  per- 
vasive, and  in  Yeats  and  Hofmannsthal,  kings  and 
poets,  ghosts  and  clowns  use  the  identical  forms  and 
cadences  of  speech. 

The  second  kind  of  dramatic  dialogue,  which  may 
be  called  the  naturalistic,  makes  such  a  selection  from 
the  actual  speech  of  men  as  to  produce  an  illusion  of 
reality.  Here  the  language  of  the  characters  is  ad- 
justed to  their  class  and  occupation,  their  actual  men- 
tality and  range  of  expression,  and  individual  pecul- 

35 


36  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

laxities  of  speech  are  studied  and  suggested.  The  occa- 
sional use  of  naturalistic  dialogue  is  old.  It  is  found 
in  Horace's  account  of  the  bore  he  met  on  the  via  sacra, 
in  Swift's  Genteel  and  Ingenious  Conversations,  in  one 
magnificent  passage  after  another  of  Tom  Jones.  But 
its  conscious  cultivation  as  a  dramatic  medium  is  re- 
cent. That  cultivation  dates  from  Hauptmann's  Before 
Dawn  (1889)  and  the  early  acts  of  Brieux's  Blanch- 
ette  (1891).  It  is  not  found  in  either  Augier  or  in 
Ibsen,  both  of  whom  use  a  kind  of  dialogue  no  less 
lifted  into  a  unity  of  style  because  that  style  is  sober 
and  pedestrian. 

The  dramatist  who  feels  an  original  creative  impulse 
need  not  ask  himself:  Ought  there  to  be  a  third  kind  of 
dialogue?  That  question  has  no  meaning  in  art.  He 
must  ask  himself:  Can  there,  in  the  nature  of  things, 
be  a  third  kind?  If  a  dramatist  strives,  as  Mr.  David 
Liebovitz  did  in  John  Hawthorne  the  other  day,  to 
make  very  simple  people  speak,  he  can  either  lend 
them  a  heightened  medium  for  all  they  would  say  if 
they  could,  as  Arthur  S5mions  did  so  beautifully  in 
The  Harvesters,  or  he  can  select  all  that  is  vivid, 
strange,  and  passionate  in  their  own  actual  speech,  as 
Hauptmann  did  so  incomparably  in  Rose  Bernd.  But 
when  he  takes  their  vernacular,  as  Hauptmann  did,  and 
tries  to  use  that  vernacular  as  Symons  used  the  medium 
of  The  Harvesters,  he  creates  a  confusion  of  styles 
which  at  once  renders  impossible  that  suspension  of 


A  Note  on  Dramatic  Dialogue  37 

disbelief  which  is  dramatic,  no  less  than  poetic,  faith. 
To  point  out  the  veracity  of  this  detail  or  that  is  futile. 
He  has  used  the  true  details  of  speech,  but  he  has  used 
them  in  a  manner  that  robs  them  of  persuasiveness  as 
art.  For  art  can  produce  nothing  closer  to  reality  than 
an  interpretative  illusion  of  it.  And  the  artist  can  fail 
of  this  object  with  well-observed  details  almost  as 
easily  as  with  those  that  have  been  observed  ill.  We 
are  convinced  by  every  word  that  Beatrice  Cenci  utters; 
we  are  equally  convinced  by  the  speech  of  Jones  in 
Galsworthy's  The  Silver  Box.  But  Jones's  vernacular 
used  in  an  attempt  to  produce  the  timeless  human  in- 
tensity of  Beatrice  would  issue  in  feebleness  and  dis- 
cord. 

The  average  American  playwright  uses  a  semi- 
naturalistic  dialogue  romanticized  by  a  bad  tradition 
drawn  from  both  plays  and  books.  The  people  of  Mr. 
James  Forbes  talk  as  shoe-dealers  and  insurance  agents 
think  they  talk  just  after  they  have  read  their  favorite 
magazines.  Mr.  Eugene  Walter  once  had  his  moments 
of  veracity.  But,  as  a  rule,  the  dialogue  of  popular 
plays  is  an  imitation  of  the  speech  that  people  like  to 
assign  to  themselves  in  their  day-dreams,  full  of  false 
gaiety  and  spurious  nobleness.  The  serious  dramatist 
cannot,  of  course,  use  this  method.  His  choice  is 
forced  upon  him.  His  manner  must  be  akin  to  Shel- 
ley's or  to  Galsworthy's.  He  will  hesitate  to  use  the 
former  for  artistic  as  well  as  for  practical  reasons. 


38  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

The  stylicized  drama,  whether  m  prose  or  verse  has, 
as  a  matter  of  hard  fact,  not  even  the  sympathy  of  our 
better  actors  and  our  better  audiences.  The  reason  for 
this  is  not  pertinent  here.  The  fact  remains.  Hence 
our  American  dramatist  is  almost  under  the  necessity 
of  observing  and  making  a  selection  from  the  actual 
speech  of  his  contemporaries. 

At  this  crucial  point  another  difficulty  confronts 
him.  Cultivated  Americans  talk  more  bookishly  and 
are  more  alienated  from  the  vernacular  than  the  cor- 
responding class  of  Europeans.  They  use  slang  and 
common  turns  of  speech  with  an  ironic  under-tone. 
The  reason  is  that  our  common  speech  is  not  folk- 
speech,  but  a  corrupt  newspaper  English  filled  with  the 
ephemeral  catch-words  of  sport  and  trade.  An  edu- 
cated Irishman  can  talk  like  an  Irish  peasant  and  still 
talk  beautifully;  an  educated  American  cannot  talk 
like  a  clerk  in  a  cigar-store  without  a  grin.  We  have 
islands  of  folk-speech  in  New  England  and  the  South. 
But  the  sporting  page  of  the  newspapers,  the  Victrola 
record  of  songs  sung  by  Nora  Bayes,  and  the  slang  of 
the  drummer  are  rapidly  obliterating  the  dialects  that 
savor  of  the  earth.  The  best,  then,  that  the  dramatist 
can  do  is,  probably,  to  follow  the  novelists  who  use  the 
corrupt  speech  of  the  populace  naturalistically  but  with 
a  constant  and  communicated  awareness  of  its  true 
character.  That  is  what  Sinclair  Lewis  did  so  admira- 
bly in  Main  Street,  and  what  Miss  Zona  Gale  did 


A  Note  on  Dramatic  Dialogue  39 

equally  well  in  Miss  Lulu  Bett.  That  both  the  speech 
in  question  and  the  author's  awareness  of  its  quality 
can  be  transferred  to  the  stage  has  been  amply  illus- 
trated by  the  first  act  of  the  dramatized  version  of  Miss 
Gale's  story.  If  the  playwright,  finally,  desires  to  deal 
with  the  minority  of  cultivated  and  sophisticated  Amer- 
icans, he  has  but  to  turn  to  modem  literary  English, 
using  it  with  what  simplicity  and  colloquial  ease  he  can 
command.  And  here,  again,  the  novelists  from  Edith 
Wharton  to  Joseph  Hergesheimer  have  set  him  excel- 
lent examples.  But  whatever  style  he  uses  must  be 
used  consistently  and  purely.  Good  dialogue,  as  Gals- 
worthy has  pointed  out,  must  be  like  hand-made  lace. 
One  thread  of  foreign  material  or  inharmonious  color 
breaks  the  web  and  destroys  the  illusion. 


A  Note  on  Acting 

Criticism  of  acting  alternates,  as  a  rule,  between  un- 
governed  ecstasy  and  rough  disdain.  Whether  Hazlitt 
celebrates  the  praise  of  Mrs.  Siddons  or  some  contem- 
porary that  of  John  Barrymore,  what  we  get  is  the 
impression  made  by  a  commanding  or  romantic  person- 
ality rather  than  the  record  of  an  artistic  achievement. 
Lesser  actors,  on  the  other  hand,  are  dismissed  without 
a  word  of  interpretation  or  instruction.  Nothing  in 
their  work  is  clearly  defined  or  accurately  understood 
by  the  criticism  they  receive,  and  little  is  left  them  but 
to  defy  their  censors  and  to  blunder  on.  Yet  actors 
deserve  helpfulness  and  close  understanding.  Their 
artistic  life  is  precarious  and  transitory.  An  approach 
to  perfection  before  middle  age  is  their  one  hope.  Only 
so  can  they  expect  a  few  rich  and  untroubled  years 
before  the  lights  go  out  upon  them  and  their  audiences. 

Nor  paint  nor  pencil  can  the  actor  save — 
Both  art  and  artist  have  one  common  grave. 

The  matter,  closely  looked  upon,  is  not  forbiddingly 
intricate.  When  toward  the  end  of  his  life  Johnson 
was  asked  to  sum  up  the  virtues  of  Garrick,  he  said: 
"A  true  conception  of  character,  and  a  natural  ex- 

40 


A  Note  on  Acting  41 

pression  of  it,  were  his  distinguished  excellencies."  We 
speak  more  subtly  to-day  and  deal  in  finer  shadings; 
the  intimate  nature  of  the  modern  drama,  the  with- 
drawal of  the  stage-picture  into  its  frame,  and  the  con- 
sequent abandoning  of  all  declamation,  have  given  the 
words  "natural  expression"  a  far  intenser  meaning. 
But  to  the  substance  of  the  old  critics  little  need  be 
added.  Actors  are  still,  as  CoUey  Gibber  declared 
them  to  be,  "self-judges  of  nature,  from  whose  various 
lights  they  only  take  their  true  instruction."  It  is 
when  they  are  such  that  we  hear,  in  the  fine  words  of 
Lessing,  "that  natural  music  which  unfailingly  opens 
all  hearts  because  we  feel  that  it  comes  from  within 
and  shows  us  that  art  has  shared  in  it  only  in  so  far  as 
art  and  nature  can  become  identical." 

The  actor's  art,  then,  however  difficult  to  practise  is 
not  difficult  to  understand.  His  intelligence  must 
grasp  the  poet's  intention  and  his  imagination  lend  it 
the  concreteness  of  life.  But  his  imaginative  activity 
must  always  be  the  servant  of  what  he  has  observed  in 
himself  and  others.  Nature  must  be  his  teacher  and 
his  norm.  He  has  never,  to  be  sure,  seen  a  Hamlet  or 
an  lago,  an  Osvald  or  a  Henschel.  But  he  has  seen 
men  in  spiritual  perplexity,  sardonic  mirth,  bleak  de- 
spair, and  dumb  confusion.  Having  built  up  the  con- 
crete projection  of  a  character  from  his  imaginative 
observation,  he  must, .  with  that  personal  plasticity 
which  alone  justifies  his  calling,  melt  into  the  being 


42  Toward  a  New  Dramaturgy 

which  the  poet  and  he  have  combined  to  fashion,  and 
speak  and  act  and  live  outward  from  within  that  being's 
very  soul.  His  faults  may  therefore  be  referred  to  a 
failure  in  one  of  the  three  basic  elements  of  his  art — 
intelligence,  imaginative  observation,  plastic  expres- 
sion. Or  else  he  may,  yielding  to  a  frequent  tempta- 
tion of  powerful  or  peculiar  personalities,  abandon  the 
art  he  is  well  fitted  to  practise  and  depend  on  a  con- 
tinuous display  of  his  own  self  under  this  or  that 
borrowed  name. 

The  commonest  fault  of  our  actors  to-day  is  a  failure 
in  the  second  element  of  their  art.  Their  eyes  are 
turned  upon  the  theatre,  upon  some  vivid  personality  of 
the  stage,  upon  their  careers  and  persons,  upon  any- 
thing except  nature  and  its  spontaneous  expression 
amid  the  varying  moods  of  life.  They  are  not  unskil- 
ful in  portraying  sharp  moments  of  passionate  excite- 
ment. There  are  few  actresses  who  cannot  weep  con- 
vincingly. They  have  all  wept  and,  like  many  modern 
people,  involuntarily  watched  the  adequate  expression 
of  their  grief.  But  in  the  level  passages  of  a  play,  in 
attempting  to  depict  the  life  from  which  the  passions 
arise,  these  very  actresses  will  be  of  an  insufferable 
and  vulgar  artificiality.  They  have  never  taken  the 
trouble  to  observe  themselves  or  others  at  common 
tasks  or  in  quiet  hours;  they  have  no  ear  or  eye  for 
the  kind  of  speech  and  gesture  by  which  the  subdued 
but  important  business  of  nine-tenths  of  life  is  carried 


A  Note  on  Acting  43 

on.  They  disdain  nature  and,  rather  than  observe  it, 
transfer  to  their  private  behavior  the  metallic  graces 
of  the  stage,  mouthing  and  languishing  at  home  and 
abroad.  On  the  stage  they  are  passable  or  even  elo- 
quent when  the  situation  is  tense.  But  they  say  "good 
morning"  or  lay  the  cloth  for  breakfast  with  the  air  of 
pinchbeck  princesses  in  disguise.  The  men  are  more 
aware  of  the  texture  of  common  existence.  But  in- 
stead of  observing  nature,  they  substitute  personal  man- 
nerisms that  are  realistic  enough  but  wear  thin  by 
constant  and  wearying  repetition  in  play  after  play. 
Mr.  Sidney  Toler  has  a  quaint  glance  and  Mr.  Wallace 
Eddinger  an  amusing  aspect  of  hurt  innocence.  But 
since  neither  one  has  observed  life,  his  mannerism  has 
become  a  mere  trick  and  his  art  an  exhibition  of  that 
single  possession.  The  personal  mannerisms  of  Mr. 
Dudley  Digges  cannot  be  studied  from  the  stalls. 
When  we  see  him  we  lose  him  and  dwell  solely  with  the 
excellence  and  truth  of  what  he  has  created. 

The  ambition  of  the  average  American  actor  is  not 
to  interpret  drama  or  create  character,  but  to  be  John 
Barrymore.  In  regard  to  Mr.  Barrymore's  artistic 
intelligence  and  fascinating  gifts  there  can  be  no  ques- 
tion. But  as  Fedya  in  Redemption,  as  Gianino  in  The 
Jest,  and  as  Richard  III  he  played  but  variations  upon 
the  theme  of  himself.  There  was  the  same  morbidezza, 
the  same  sense  of  inferiority  becoming  fierceness  or 
malign  splendor,  the  same  white  profile,  the  same 


44  Toward  a  New-  Dramaturgy 

stricken  grace.  In  each  piece  one  became  primarily 
aware  not  of  a  creature  of  a  given  world  and  kind,  but 
of  John  Barrymore's  somewhat  hectic  idealization  of 
himself.  It  was  not,  first  of  all,  acting,  but  superb  day- 
dreaming upon  the  stage.  Mr.  Lionel  Barr5rmore,  de- 
void of  his  brother's  poignant  charm,  is  a  far  more 
scrupulous  practitioner  of  his  art.  His  Neri  in  The 
Jest,  was  shaggy,  boisterous,  full  of  excess  and  gorgeous 
wildness;  his  Mouzon  in  La  Robe  Rouge  was  polished, 
quietly  cynical,  hard,  and  graceless  in  an  inimitably 
truthful  modern  way.  The  two  creations  had  nothing 
in  common  but  his  intelligence,  his  powers  of  observa- 
tion, his  ability  to  project  what  he  had  grasped  and 
seen.  The  contrast  illustrates  this  brief  argument  and 
sums  it  up.  To  emulate  John  Barrymore  is  both  fool- 
ish and  impossible;  to  imitate  his  brother  is  to  have  a 
just  and  fruitful  notion  of  the  actor's  art. 


II 

The  American  Stage 


t 


Mr.  Belasco  Explains 

For  thirty-seven  years  Mr.  David  Belasco  has  devoted 
himself  to  the  art  of  the  theatre.  In  remote  cities 
where  no  other  American  manager's  name  would  be 
recognized,  his  is  known.  If  a  girl  is  applauded  in 
amateur  theatricals  in  Peoria  or  Denver  she  writes  for 
counsel  and  help  to  David  Belasco.  There  is  a  Belasco 
legend  composed  of  anecdotes  that  commercial  travel- 
ers swap  in  smoking-cars;  there  is  a  Belasco  biography 
in  two  stout  volumes  by  the  late  William  Winter;  there 
is,  finally,  issued  but  the  other  day,  the  word  of  Mr. 
Belasco  himself.^  The  critics  may  jeer  mildly;  the 
knowing  ones  among  the  public  may  show  a  correct 
disdain.  They  are  all  impressed.  A  Belasco  opening 
— the  first  of  any  given  season  above  all — still  com- 
mands its  very  special  little  alertness  and  thrill. 

And  why  should  not  these  people  be  impressed?  Mr. 
Belasco's  dedication  to  his  chosen  art  is  as  tireless  as 
it  is  complete.  He  has  spared  no  toil  and  no  expense 
to  produce  what  he  considers  beautiful  things.  He  has 
never  been  cynical  about  his  success,  but  has  taken  it 
to  be  the  reward  of  his  hard  gained  merits.  He  is 
satisfied  with  himself  and  with  his  public.     He  has 

1  The  Theatre  through  its  Stage  Door.    By  David  Belasco. 

47 


48  The  American  Stage 

made  art  pay.  He  still  makes  it  pay.  And  who  has 
the  right  to  deny  the  mifailing  qualities  of  every  Belasco 
production — the  silken  delicacy  of  its  surface,  the  un- 
obtrusive perfection  of  its  visible  details,  the  gentle 
glow  and  harmony  of  its  color  schemes?  Not  those, 
assuredly,  who  daily  applaud  the  less  perfect  produc- 
tions of  quite  similar  plays  on  another  street.  Nor 
those  others  who,  in  high  places  and  humble  ones,  pro- 
claim the  theatrical  theory  of  the  drama — the  theory, 
namely,  that  plays  are  "built"  in  the  theatre,  not  written 
in  solitude;  that  they  are  constructed  to  be  gladly  heard 
by  any  audience  of  the  moment,  not  created  to  be  over- 
heard by  the  finer  spirits  of  the  age. 

Of  that  theory  Mr.  Belasco's  practice  is  the  best  of 
all  possible  illustrations.  A  manuscript  to  him  is  not 
something  to  be  interpretatively  bodied  forth.  It  is  a 
little  raw  material  and  a  convenient  starting-point. 
"Almost  invariably,"  he  tells  us,  "the  exceptionally  suc- 
cessful play  is  not  written  but  re-written."  During  the 
crucial  week  of  preliminary  rehearsals,  he  continues, 
"I  rewrite,  transpose,  change,  and  cut  until  the  manu- 
script is  so  interlined  that  it  is  almost  impossible  to 
read  it.  .  .  .  If  it  seems  too  heavy  at  a  certain  point, 
it  must  be  lightened;  if  too  tearful,  laughter  must  be 
brought  into  it."  It  is  no  wonder  that  Mr.  Belasco  is 
the  author  or  co-author  of  many  of  the  plays  he  has 
produced,  and  that  he  has  sedulously  avoided  the  work 
of  any  master.    What  could  he  do  with  the  method  of 


Mr.  Belasco  Explains  49 

production  so  truly  attributed  to  another  manager  in 
another  land,  the  method  that  strives  to  give  to  each 
play  "its  individual  style,  its  special  atmosphere,  its 
peculiar  inner  music."  ^  "Who  am  I?"  asked  Oscar 
Wilde,  only  half  in  jest,  when  he  was  urged  to  make 
changes  in  An  Ideal  Husband  for  the  production  of  the 
play,  "Who  am  I  to  tamper  with  a  masterpiece?"  Mr. 
Belasco  has  not  tampered  with  masterpieces.  He  has 
left  them  alone.  And  that  is  what  every  producing 
manager  must  do  who  desires — as  our  professors  coun- 
sel and  indeed  command — to  build  successful  plays  in 
the  theatre. 

To  Mr.  Belasco,  at  all  events,  the  play  has  been  but 
one  of  many  things.  "The  all-important  factor  in  a 
dramatic  production,"  he  tells  us,  "is  the  lighting  of  the 
scenes."  And  again:  "The  greatest  part  of  my  success 
in  the  theatre  I  attribute  to  my  feeling  for  colors  trans- 
lated into  effects  of  light."  He  has  ransacked  the  curio 
shops  of  ancient  cities  for  furniture  and  the  fabled 
East  for  silken  draperies  and  has  found  in  these  "explo- 
rations in  search  of  stage  equipment  really  the  most 
interesting  part"  of  his  work.  And  he  has  sought  out 
charming  and  promising  young  persons  and  chosen  and 
adjusted  them  as  he  would  select  and  adjust  folds  of 
rich  velvet  or  the  glow  of  a  new  tint  of  light  into  the 
harmony  of  a  production.  He  has  "made"  Frances 
Starr  and  Jeanne  Eagels  and  Lenore  Ulric  and  Ina 

1  Max  Reinhardt.    By  Siegfried  Jacobsohn.    Berlin,    1910. 


50  The  American  Stage 

Claire.  He  has  fitted  them  like  brilliant  bits  of  glass 
into  the  shifting  colors  of  his  successive  scenes.  And 
yet  this  prestidigitator  of  light  and  shadows,  this  clever 
artificer,  this  glorified  interior  decorator,  whose  con- 
sciousness has  never  been  touched  by  either  life  or  art, 
holds  himself  to  be  a  realist.  "I  am  a  realist,"  he  pro- 
claims proudly  and  sincerely.  And  he  is  a  realist  be- 
cause on  his  stage  he  "will  allow  nothing  to  be  built  of 
canvas  stretched  on  frames.  Everything  must  be  real." 
He  is  a  realist  because  when  he  produced  The  Music 
Master  he  "searched  for  people  in  the  theatres  of  the 
lower  East  Side";  because  he  employed  real  Japanese  in 
The  Darling  of  the  Gods  and  caused  the  Uhlans  in 
Marie-Odile  to  be  represented  by  real  Germans!  In 
such  preoccupations  he  has  spent  a  lifetime  of  labor  and 
has  ended  by  impressing  a  nation.  He  has  touched 
nothing  that  he  has  not,  in  his  own  inimitable  sense, 
adorned. 

What  has  he  touched?  He  could  never,  as  we  have 
seen,  produce  the  work  of  a  great  dramatist.  No  great 
dramatist  would  have  endured  the  process.  He  has 
given  us  one  play  by  Pierre  Wolff  and  one  by  Her- 
mann Bahr.  He  saw  the  unfulfilled  promise  of  Eugene 
Walter  and  staged  The  Easiest  Way.  The  rest  is  sen- 
timent and  drapery — The  Music  Master  and  Du  Barry, 
The  Auctioneer  and  The  Darling  of  the  Gods.  .  He  ven- 
tured on  Tiger,  Tiger,  but  accompanied  it  by  the  ultra- 
saccharine  Daddies;  he  re-wrote  and  re-built  Dark 


Mr.  Belasco  Explains  51 

Rosaleen  until  it  was  pretty  and  trivial  enough;  he 
engaged  Mr.  Albert  Bruning  only  to  load  him  with 
Chinese  robes  in  a  spectacle  play  by  George  Scarbor- 
ough. He  likes  to  have  children  on  the  stage  as  often 
as  possible  and  hence  avoids  plays  in  which  there  are 
none.  For  such  plays,  in  his  opinion,  "view  life  flip- 
pantly and  cynically,  like  the  comedies  of  Bernard 
Shaw";  he  is  blandly  unconscious  of  the  contemporary 
practice  of  his  profession  elsewhere,  except  to  fling  a 
querulous  word  at  Max  Reinhardt,  a  producing  man- 
ager who,  during  the  first  eight  years  of  his  career,  pre- 
sented one  play  each  by  Aristophanes,  Euripides,  Cal- 
deron,  Moliere,  Goldoni,  Lessing,  Henri  Becque,  Tol- 
stoi, Hauptmann,  Donnay,  Chekhov,  Gorki,  and  J.  M. 
S3aige,  two  by  Hebbel,  Kleist,  Gogol,  Strindberg  and 
Schnitzler,  three  by  Grillparzer,  Wilde,  and  Maeter- 
linck; four  by  Schiller,  Goethe,  Wedekind,  and  Hof- 
mannsthal;  five  by  Ibsen;  six  by  Shaw;  and  nine  by 
Shakespeare ! 

The  Gold  Diggers  by  Avery  Hopwood  is  a  perfect 
example  of  Mr.  Belasco's  art.  There  is  a  foolish  little 
story  about  a  savage  uncle  who  wishes  to  rescue  his 
nephew  from  a  chorus  girl  and  himself  falls  a  prey  to 
the  charms  of  another.  There  is  a  sunny  little  moral 
about  chorus  girls  duly  emphasized  by  a  gray-haired 
mother.  But  neither  the  story  nor  the  moral  is  very 
obtrusive.  These,  as  well  as  Mr.  Hopwood 's  little  local 
jests,  serve,  after  all,  only  to  call  attention  to  a  burst 


^2  The  American  Stage 

of  morning  sunlight  which  Nature  would  do  well  to  emu- 
late more  often,  to  Mr.  BcIelsco's  exquisite  bits  of  color, 
to  the  influence  of  his  training  upon  the  talent  and  per- 
sonality of  his  latest  creation,  Miss  Ina  Claire.  The 
latter  illustrates  his  most  solid  gift.  He  can  train 
actresses.  Miss  Claire's  rendering  of  her  lines  in  the 
first  act  has  the  daintiest  verisimilitude  and  the  nicest 
precision  in  its  miniature  way;  her  crucial  scene  in  the 
second  act,  in  which  she  feigns  intoxication  so  well  and 
yet  never  lets  us  lose  a  sense  of  spiritual  delicacy,  is  a 
little  marvel  of  its  kind.  But  the  almost  total  waste 
of  talent  and  hard  work  exemplified  in  these  bits  sym- 
bolizes once  more  and  depressingly  enough  the  char- 
acter of  Mr.  Belasco's  whole  career.  Miss  Claire  has 
intelligence  and  flexibility;  Miss  Jobyna  Rowland  has 
her  unfailing  vein  of  natural  and  robust  humor;  Mr. 
Bruce  McRae  is  a  careful  artist;  quite  minor  members 
of  the  cast  do  credit  to  Mr.  Belasco's  persuasive  meth- 
ods. Thus  a  highly  agreeable  entertainment  is  offered, 
an  entertainment  that  eludes  criticism  by  never  coming 
within  its  proper  range.  But  we  dare  neglect  neither 
the  show  nor  the  master  of  the  show  so  long  as  any  are 
left  among  us  who  believe  that  either  one  sustains  the 
slightest  relation  to  the  drama  or  the  drama's  interpre- 
tation on  the  stage  of  our  time. 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions 

I.     The  Faithful 

The  Theatre  Guild  began  its  career  with  the  presenta- 
tion of  a  fantastic  comedy,  The  Bonds  of  Interest,  by 
the  Spanish  playwright,  Jacinto  Benavente.  The  suc- 
cess of  that  first  venture  was  small.  Next  the  Guild 
undertook  to  give  the  public  the  wholesome  bread  of 
realistic  art,  and  the  brilliant  success  of  John  Ferguson 
serves,  even  after  a  discounting  of  its  adventitious  ele- 
ments, almost  to  mark  an  q)och  in  the  American  the- 
atre. It  is,  therefore,  a  little  disheartening  to  the 
friends  of  the  Guild  to  see  them,  in  their  third  produc- 
tion, John  Masefield's  The  Faithful,  return  to  the  ex- 
ploitation of  the  merely  fantastic  strain  in  dramatic 
literature.  For  it  is  a  fact  that  the  ventures  of  the 
insurgent  theatre  and  of  the  art  theatre  in  \his  country 
have  constantly  come  to  grief  through  their  cultivation 
of  the  over-refined,  the  exotic,  and  the  fanciful.  From 
the  play  lists  of  our  little  theatres  one  would  infer,  if 
one  knew  no  better,  that  the  staple  of  the  modem 
drama  is  the  neo-romantic  in  its  most  tenuous  and 
cloudy  moods.  It  was  not  by  such  methods  that  the 
Theatre  Libre  and  the  Verein  Freie  Biihne  revived  and 
re-created  the  European  theatre.    Each  began  by  pre- 

53 


54  The  American  Stage 

senting  those  foreign  plays  which  most  searchingly 
interpreted  the  human  problems  of  its  immediate  pres- 
ent, each  saw  and  fulfilled  its  final  mission  by  opening 
the  theatre  to  the  young  revolutionaries  of  the  native 
drama.  These  stages  began  with  Ibsen  and  Tolstoi; 
they  ended  with  Curel,  Brieux,  and  Hauptmann. 

The  success  of  those  now  historic  undertakings  was 
no  accidental  one.  It  was  not  by  mere  accident  that 
the  early  audiences  of  The  Faithful  at  the  Garrick  The- 
atre felt  a  perceptible  estrangement  and  chill.  The 
Greeks  were  right  when  they  made  the  Muses  the 
daughters  of  Memory.  It  is  from  memory  that  the 
creative  imagination  springs.  The  spiritual  energy  of 
the  poet  may  indeed  transform  and  creatively  interpret 
the  world.  But  it  must  be  a  world  that  he  has  orig- 
inally seen  and  lived  in.  It  must  be  founded  on  a  soil 
that  has  known  the  tread  of  his  footsteps  and  the  mois- 
ture of  his  tears.  He  may  project  the  elements  of  his 
experience,  as  Shakespeare  did  in  The  Tempest  and  as 
Goethe  did  in  the  second  part  of  Faust,  into  a  region 
unseen  by  any  mortal  eye.  But  the  elements  of  hk 
own  experience,  the  vision  of  his  own  mind,  the  pang 
of  his  own  heart  must  still  be  present  there.  What 
does  Mr.  Masefield  deeply  know  of  the  feudal  life  of 
Old  Japan?  What  experience  of  his  own  soul  has  he 
bodied  forth  through  that  shadowy  and  alien  world? 
Pictures  and  translated  legends  caught  his  fancy,  and 
from  these  pictures  and  these  far-off  echoes  in  another 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions        55 

tongue  he  wove  a  pattern  of  ghostly  lights  and  mimic 
passions.  But  he  has  not  shared  these  passions  and 
the  tragedy  has  not  been,  in  some  ultimate  sense,  part 
of  the  tragic  life  of  his  own  heart.  The  old  Horatian 
tag  with  its  sovereign  common  sense  sums  up  the  whole 
matter: 

Si  vis  me  flere,  dolendum  est 
Primum  ipsi  tibi:  tum  tua  me  infortunia  laedent. 

It  is  worth  while  to  glance  briefly  at  the  fable  of  the 
play.  By  guile  and  force  the  crafty  and  unscrupulous 
daimio  Kira  takes  possession  of  the  narrow  hills  and 
woodlands  of  the  daimio  Asano.  An  envoy  from  the 
imperial  court  comes  to  that  province.  Partly  through 
fear  and  enmity,  partly  because  Asano  will  not  stoop 
to  bribery,  Kira  deliberately  misleads  him  concerning 
the  nature  of  the  ritual  by  which  an  imperial  envoy 
must  be  greeted.  Asano  thus  becomes  guilty  of  an  in- 
voluntary sacrilege  and  is  forced  to  commit  hari-kiri. 
His  exiled  retainers,  led  by  his  counselor  Kurano, 
pledge  thwnselves  to  avenge  the  death  of  their  lord. 
After  devious  wanderings  and  on  the  very  point  of 
abandoning  their  purpose  in  despair,  their  opportunity 
comes  and  they  slay  Kira  at  the  moment  of  his  highest 
earthly  power  and  triumph.  The  trouble  with  all  this, 
for  a  contemporary  audience,  arises  from  the  fact  that 
the  remoteness  of  the  action  is  not  redeemed  by  any 
warmth  or  reality  of  motivation.    Kurano  is  at  no  mo- 


^6  The  American  Stage 

ment  conscious  of  any  essential  injustice  in  the  coil 
of  circumstance  in  which  he  and  his  friend  are  in- 
volved. To  him  the  matter  is  a  purely  personal  one. 
Asano  has  been  killed.  Therefore  Kira  must  be  killed. 
The  same  is  true  of  the  humbler  retainers  who  aban- 
don their  wives  and  children,  not  in  order  to  bring  a 
little  more  justice  into  their  world,  not  to  prevent  such 
things,  not  to  protest  against  tyranny  through  Kira's 
death,  but  simply  to  kill  him  to  even  the  score.  Nor 
is  it  true,  as  may  conceivably  be  urged,  that  this  is 
demanding  a  modern  attitude  of  the  ancient  Japanese. 
The  peasant  wars  of  medieval  Europe  illustrate  the 
dim  but  massive  sense  of  general  injustice  that  may  fire 
humble  and  unlettered  men. 

Granting,  however,  the  purely  personal  and  hence 
remote  nature  of  this  conflict,  and  disregarding,  for  a 
moment,  the  total  absence  of  the  poet's  deeper  and 
more  spontaneous  energy  from  the  execution  of  the 
play,  the  vexing  question  still  remains:  in  what  man- 
ner are  these  characters  to  behave?  There  is  an  im- 
pression current  in  th6  West  that  the  Japanese  are  and, 
above  all,  historically  were  given  to  an  extraordinary 
measure  of  stoical  self-repression  and  continually* 
sheathed  their  human  impulses  in  the  rigid  forms  of 
some  prescribed  ceremony.  Mr.  Masefield's  central 
incident  and  the  exciting  cause  of  his  whole  action,  be- 
ing concerned  with  a  breach  of  ritual,  deepens  that  im- 
pression.  But  so  soon  as  we  leave  that  incident,  we  are 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions         57 

plunged  into  a  loud,  turbulent,  and  yet  futile  violence 
which  accompanies  us  to  the  end.  What  is  no  doubt 
true  is  that  both  elements,  the  self-rq)ression  and  the 
violence,  exist  in  the  history  and  character  of  the  Jap- 
anese people.  But  Mr.  Masefield  has  not  made  the 
necessary  synthesis;  he  has  not  derived  both  from  some 
fundamental  trait  of  that  character.  And  he  has  not 
done  so  for  the  simple  reason  that  he  does  not  know 
enough.  The  play  is  not  written  from  within  the  ethnic 
consciousness  with  which  it  deals.  Sound  and  con- 
vincing art  cannot  arise  from  a  contact  so  external. 

The  players  struggle  painfully  with  Mr.  Masefield's 
unsolved  problems.  Mr.  Rollo  Peters,  as  Asano,  gives 
an  admirable  performance.  He  is  the  impassive,  sto- 
ical, gentle-souled  Japanese  aristocrat — a  creature  all 
silk  and  steel.  He  answers  our  preconception  which 
is,  however,  quite  untested  by  experience.  Mr.  Augus- 
tin  Duncan  has  been  reproved  for  the  boisterousness 
of  his  performance  as  Kurano.  It  is  true  that  he  is 
noisy  and  jerky.  But  he  could  make  out  a  fair  case 
for  himself  by  appealing  to  his  author's  text.  Mr. 
Henry  Herbert  is  keen  as  a  blade  and  subtle  as  a 
poison  in  the  part  of  Kira.  But  again  it  is  our  un- 
tested preconception  of  an  Oriental  villain  that  wins 
our  applause.  The  worthlessness  and  indeed  the  dan- 
ger of  all  such  preconceptions  are  among  the  most  ter- 
rible facts  of  our  time.  Hence  the  poet  here  leads  us 
into  uncertainties  of  judgment  which  are  fatal  to  any 


58  The  American  Stage 

pleasure  or  any  suspension  of  disbelief.  Mr.  Lee 
Simonson's  scenery  is  of  a  delicate  beauty.  Form  and 
color  are  a  more  universal  language  than  articulate 
speech.  Only  a  people's  speech  can  lead  us  to  its  soul. 
Both  Mr.  Masefield  and  ourselves  stand  on  the  thresh- 
old of  a  gate  to  which  we  have  no  access. 

II.    Jane  Clegg 

Politics  crumble  and  opinions  and  moralities  fade. 
Life,  whose  meaning  must  somehow  be  sought  within 
itself,  goes  on.  The  tongue  of  the  propagandist  turns 
to  dust,  but  the  voice  of  nature  remains.  Merely  to 
capture  and  project  some  bit  of  reality  is,  therefore, 
to  practise  not  only  the  best  art  but  the  most  philo- 
sophical. Such  art  seems  quiet  enough  amid  the  noisy 
contentions  of  the  day.  But  its  quietude  is  that  of  a 
tree  amid  rockets.  The  rockets  glitter  and  go  out;  the 
earth-rooted  tree  will  shelter  generations. 

St.  John  Ervine's  Jane  Clegg  is  not  a  great  play, 
even  though  we  measure  in  terms  of  depth  and  inten- 
sity rather  than  of  range.  But  it  belongs  to  a  great 
kind.  Isolated  plays  of  this  kind  have  had  a  way  of 
being  written  for  the  modern  English  theatre  and  of 
having  no  successors  by  the  same  hand.  There  was 
Elizabeth  Baker's  Chains  and  Githa  Sowerby's  Ruth- 
erford and  Son.  Perhaps  Mr.  Ervine's  success  in  the 
theatre  will  fortify  his  talent,  will  render  it  more  fruit- 
ful and  also  more  faithful  to  itself.    And  that  is  neces- 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions         59 

sary.  For  it  is  likely  to  be  forgotten  that  he  wrote 
Jane  Clegg  in  191 3  and  John  Ferguson  two  years  later 
and  hence  tended  to  lapse  from  the  perfect  sobriety, 
the  weighty  reality,  the  strictly  inherent  irony  of  the 
earlier  play.  In  John  Ferguson  the  people  are  real 
enough,  though  James  Caesar  verges  on  the  monstrous 
and  "Clutie"  John  on  the  unsoundly  fantastic.  But 
these  people  are  involved  in  a  coil  of  circumstance — 
the  mortgaged  farm,  the  delayed  remittance,  the  false 
suspicion  of  murder — which  smacks  strongly  of  the 
melodramatic  theatre. 

In  Jane  Clegg  the  people  are  found  in  no  predica- 
ment except  the  inevitable  one  of  their  own  natures, 
and  the  dramatic  process  is  identical  with  the  exhaus- 
tive exposition  of  their  inmost  selves.  With  the  high- 
est skill  and  courage  Mr,  Ervine  carries  out  the  purity 
of  his  intention  to  the  very  close  of  the  play.  Henry 
Clegg  leaves  his  home.  The  climax  of  the  story,  how- 
ever, is  not  in  that  action  but  in  that  last  talk  between 
himself  and  his  wife  which  gives  our  vision  of  him  its 
final  clarity  and  expresses  his  blundering  justification 
of  his  own  miserable  self.  Thus  the  logic  of  reality  is 
completed  and  his  physical  departure  is  not  an  action 
by  which  a  play  is  closed  but  the  symbol  of  a  life's 
necessities. 

That  life  in  which  the  play,  despite  its  title,  really 
centers  is  completely  unrolled  before  us,  although  the 
dialogue  contains  little  or  no  technical  exposition  in 


6o  The  American  Stage 

the  older  sense.  But  we  are  made  aware  of  the  shab- 
bily gay,  irresponsible  father;  we  see  the  garrulous, 
foolishly  indulgent  mother.  We  know  how  Henry 
Clegg,  ignorant,  awkward,  rigidly  respectable  in  his 
sentiments,  goaded  forever  by  his  hungry  senses,  has 
sneaked  and  bragged  his  way  through  the  years  and 
how  he  would  have  done  so  quite  peacefully  to  the  end 
but  for  his  wife's  rectitude  of  mind  and  decision  of 
character.  That  is  his  catastrophe.  Not  the  meanest 
creature  can  exist  in  a  state  of  being  continually  shown 
up.  It  cannot  live  under  so  fierce  a  light.  Some  rag  of 
self-esteem,  however  falsely  come  by,  must  cover  the 
nakedness  of  every  soul. 

But  Mr.  Ervine  has  not  missed  the  fact — and  at  this 
point  he  touches  greatness — that  his  cockney  clerk  with 
a  mind  as  stale  and  shabby  as  his  very  clothes  and 
speech  is  the  absurd  and  tragi-comic  battleground  of 
great  forces.  Henry  Clegg  does  not  know  it,  but  his 
civilization  has  made  of  him  a  man  monstrously  divided 
against  himself.  Through  generations  it  has  bred  into 
his  very  bone  an  assent  to  certain  moral  principles  and 
sentiments.  But  it  has  left  his  nature  and  his  in- 
stincts unexplained  and  untouched.  Hence  the  whole 
man  is  but  one  gesture  of  furtiveness.  Everything 
about  him  is  false.  His  soul  is  shoddy.  Truth  is  to 
him  the  highest  indecency.  Thus  when  he  is  about  to 
leave  his  wife  and  go  off  to  Canada  with  his  "fancy" 
woman,  he  is  deeply  pained  and  shocked  at  his  wife's 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions         6i 

callous  willingness  to  let  her  own  husband  to  whom 
God  has  joined  her  go  without  wails  or  recriminations 
or  the  sense  of  the  presence  of  sin.  He  has  a  brief  mo- 
ment that  verges  on  a  grotesque  self-righteousness.  He 
is  a  wretched  sinner  but  at  least  he  has  the  grace  to 
know  it.  That  is  his  religion.  Jane  may  be  pure  and 
honorable.  But  she  has  no  sense  of  sin.  It  almost 
frightens  him.  In  Jane,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is 
illustrated  the  slow  and  painful  struggle  by  which  a 
few  people  here  and  there  learn  to  sweep  aside  the 
moral  convention  and  lay  hold  upon  the  moral  fact. 
Since  Henry's  actions  and  her  emotional  reactions  have 
destroyed  whatever  peace  or  beauty  their  marriage 
ever  held,  how  empty  to  go  on  babbling  about  its  sanc- 
tity! It  is  a  burden  and  a  shame.  Both  she  and  the 
children  will  be  better  off  without  him.  She  feels  a 
natural  pang  at  the  breach  with  her  youth  and  her 
heart's  past.  But  the  pang  is  not  uncontrollable.  She 
turns  out  the  gas  and  goes  upstairs. 

Thus  it  will  be  seen  that  the  intellectual  content  of 
the  play  is  weighty  enough.  But  it  is  never  emphasized 
nor  abstracted  from  the  stuff  of  life  itself.  It  appears 
through  those  traits  and  attitudes  of  the  characters 
which  arise  from  the  impact  between  the  individual  and 
the  processes  of  that  civilization  within  which  he  has 
been  molded.  But  to  grasp  the  simple  reality,  as  Mr. 
Ervine  has  here  done,  is  enough.  If  the  grasp  be  but 
firm  and  close  the  universal  values  will  appear  more 


62  The  American  Stage 

strongly  than  if  the  dramatist  had  reflected  on  them 
first  and  watched  life  afterwards. 

Mr.  Reicher's  production  of  the  play  for  the  Theatre 
Guild  is  undoubtedly  the  most  perfect  thing  on  our 
stage  to-day.  It  has  an  exquisite  discretion;  it  does 
not  impair  the  fullest  sense  of  reality  at  any  point;  it 
has  found  the  beautifully  right  atmosphere  and  gesture 
for  every  moment  in  the  play's  shifting  moods.  It 
allows  no  sense  of  artificial  transition  from  mood  to 
mood  to  awaken  in  us,  and  it  preserves  inviolable  its 
seamless  illusion  of  both  the  continuity  and  the  change 
of  life.  Thus  the  spectator  need  never  become  aware 
of  it  as  of  something  consciously  done,  but  can  yield 
himself  to  the  power  of  the  embodied  play  as  to  an 
undivided  artistic  and  spiritual  experience.  And  that 
is  rare.  We  have  other  good  productions.  But  they 
are  very  consciously  and  proudly  good,  and  often  their 
excellence  throws  only  into  starker  relief  the  hollow- 
ness  of  the  play  on  which  they  are  expended.  Or  else 
a  single  unsubdued  and  "stagy"  actor  shatters  the  illu- 
sion. The  five  players  who  are  associated  with  Mr. 
Reicher  in  Jane  Clegg  have  blended  their  personalities 
wholly  with  the  inner  life  of  the  play.  Its  world  has 
become  theirs.  We  do  not  remember  them  except  in 
,  these  shapes  which  they  have  assumed.  The  identity 
of  art  and  life  is  for  once  complete,  and  thus  the  two 
hours  during  which  we  watch  them  are  a  pure  example 
of  that  enlargement  of  our  contracted  selves  through 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions        63 

a  vicarious  experience  which  is  the  very  core  of  art 
itself. 

III.    Jangled  Lives 

As  its  fourth  subscription  performance  of  the  season 
of  1920  the  Guild  presented  Strindberg's  The  Dance  of 
Death.  The  production  had  the  two  notes  of  faithful- 
ness to  fact  and  density  of  moral  atmosphere  which 
mark  Mr.  Reicher's  work.  The  hexagonal  tower-room 
designed  by  Mr.  Lee  Simonson  for  the  first  part  of  the 
play  combined  clearness  and  freedom  with  a  somber 
and  menacing  beauty.  The  players  were  sincere  and 
created  occasional  moments  of  unaffected  eloquence; 
it  is  doubtful  whether  they  had  quite  penetrated  to  the 
inner  substance  of  the  play.  Mr.  Albert  Perry  dis- 
played an  extraordinary  virtuosity  without  an  inner 
assumption  of  the  character  he  portrayed.  Mr.  Dudley 
Digges,  one  of  the  best  actors  on  our  stage,  is  too  home- 
spun and  forthright  for  Strindberg.  Miss  Helen  West- 
ley  alone  conveyed  the  sense  of  a  vivid  experience  and 
of  having  projected  into  the  play  not  only  skill  but  a 
soul  that  can  be  troubled.  Despite  its  comparative 
inadequacy,  the  production  brings  to  an  honorable  close 
the  second  season  of  the  only  American  theatre  of  which 
we  can  be  wholly  proud. 

What  a  play!  Written  in  1901  it  leaps  beyond  its 
year  and  ours  and  establishes  the  dramaturgy  of  the 
future.    Its  method  is  as  astonishing  as  it  is  simple. 


64  The  American  Stage 

It  deals  with  people,  not  with  moral  attributes.  It 
does  not  let  an  abstract  quality  overshadow  a  man. 
Strindberg  clove  to  the  root  of  the  ancient  fallacy  in 
the  Horatian  council  to  "let  Medea  be  fierce,  Ino  tear- 
ful, Ixion  perfidious,  and  Orestes  sad."  For  the  result 
of  such  characterization  is  to  give  us  Ferocity,  Perfidy, 
Sadness.  What  was  Othello's  occupation  during  the 
period  covered  by  the  play  when  he  was  not  jealous? 
Did  Alceste  consider  the  question  of  social  probity  at 
breakfast?  The  drama  is  full  of  "humors"  and  "rul- 
ing passions."  Rarely  until  very  late  does  it  present 
men  and  women.  The  reply  that  a  dramatic  action 
demands  a  concentration  and  an  overemphatic  treat- 
ment of  its  motives  only  restates  the  old  fallacy  in 
another  form.  The  psychologist  tells  us  for  conven- 
ience about  abstract  memory  or  imagination.  In  reality 
there  are  no  such  things.  There  are  indeed,  in  the 
thumping  Stevensonian  phrase,  "passionate  crises  of 
existence."  But  they  hardly  arise  when  "duty  and 
inclination  come  nobly  to  the  grapple."  Who  knows 
his  inclination?  Will  it  be  exactly  the  same  if  it  rains 
to-morrow?  Suppose  she  wears  her  hair  differently  in 
the  morning,  or  there  is  a  slump  in  the  market,  or  one 
wakes  with  an  attack  of  influenza?  These  noble  and 
naked  absolutes  grimly  face  to  face  were  all  very  well 
when  your  heroes  were  kings  or  generals  making  gran- 
diose and  probably  vicious  decisions  at  the  risk  of  some 
one  else's  skin.    And  duty?    Shall  I  do  my  duty — the 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions         65 

thing  prescribed  from  without  by  social  compacts  and 
moral  traditions,  or  shall  I  do  my  duty,  a  thing  so 
difficult  and  fragile  and  much  to  be  desired?  Can  either 
be  disengaged  clearly  enough  at  a  given  moment  to 
justify  the  eruptive  gesture  of  the  dramaturgic  tradi- 
tion? 

The  Captain  and  his  wife  in  The  Dance  of  Death 
have  seen  each  other  so  long  and  so  closely  that  they 
no  longer  see  each  other  at  all.  They  try,  like  all 
people,  to  find  moral  tags  in  the  name  of  which  they 
can  justify  their  mutual  hatred.  It  is  a  profoundly 
true  circumstance  that  Alice  does  this  more  continually 
than  her  husband,  who  yields  quite  unreflectively  to 
his  vindictive  impulses.  The  woman  is  more  passion- 
ate, yet  more  desirous  of  justifying  her  hatred.  Hence 
she  is  eager  to  prove  to  him  the  qualities  that  explain 
it.  She  has,  no  doubt,  chances  enough.  Again  and 
again  she  convinces  her  friend  and  kinsman  Curt.  But 
in  the  end  all  hatred  breaks  down  because  all  isolation 
of  moral  qualities  becomes  impossible.  We  know  least 
those  whom  we  know  best,  because  we  see  them  no 
longer  analytically  but  concretely.  We  have  no  clues, 
because  every  clue  becomes  coarse  and  misleading  when 
brought  to  the  test  of  a  reality  so  intricate  and  obscure. 
This  husband  and  this  wife  feign,  at  times  with  pas- 
sion and  terror,  to  despise  and  hate  each  other.  Yet 
they  are  unable  to  break  their  galling  chains  because, 
having  passed  beyond  the  perception  of  mere  evil  quali- 


66  The  American  Stage 

ties  in  each  other  and  seeing  each  other  as  concrete 
psychical  organisms,  they  cannot  hold  either  contempt 
or  hatred  long  enough.  They  shift  and  waver  and 
know  too  much  to  rise  to  the  point  of  willing  and  they 
die  in  the  inextricable  bonds  in  which  they  are  caught. 

"There  are  disharmonies  in  life,"  Strindberg  lets 
Gustav  say  in  Creditors,  "that  cannot  be  resolved." 
The  tragic  outcome  is  that  there  is  no  tragic  outcome. 
There  is  no  liberating  action  and  no  appeasement  of  the 
heart.  The  years  drag  on  and  the  shadows  lengthen 
and  then  comes  the  dance  of  death.  Children  grow 
up  and  fall  into  the  same  entanglements  and  almost  at 
once  the  familiar  disharmonies  begin  to  sound — as 
Alice  hears  them  from  Judith  and  Alan  and  the  lieu- 
tenant. But  the  will  to  live  and  continue  the  race  gilds 
all  beginnings  with  romance,  and  the  Captain  and  his 
wife  in  the  tower-room  are  neither  an  example  nor  a 
warning.  Nor  is  it  only  the  young  whom  instinct  robs 
of  vision.  Alice  has  but  to  make  the  immemorial  ges- 
ture and  Curt,  the  clear-minded  and  the  disillusioned, 
is  in  flames. 

Yet  from  this  very  play  there  arises  a  hope  beyond 
the  note  of  compassion  with  which,  contrary  to  the  cus- 
tom of  his  more  acrid  years,  Strindberg  ends  his  action. 
It  is  no  accident  that  the  Captain  and  Alice  live  on  an 
island.  Most  married  couples  do.  They  have  the  same 
friends  and  see  the  same  scenes.  People  and  the  very 
trees  and  streets  take  on  the  blurred  colors  of  that  tense 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions         67 

and  monotonous  and  islanded  existence.  They  cling 
to  each  other  and  restrict  each  other  and  seek  to  en- 
force agreements  and  concessions  and  harmonies  of 
which  the  very  nature  must  be  the  spontaneity  of  per- 
fect freedom.  They  assume  possession  and  practise 
force,  and  the  island  becomes  a  prison.  The  Captain 
and  Alice  stayed  on  the  island  as  each  other's  keepers. 
Thus  each  became  at  once  a  tyrant  and  a  slave.  If 
only  they  had  tried  a  Httle  wandering  and  used  their 
island  as  a  place  of  peace  and  refuge,  and  renounced 
possession  as  the  one  hope  of  coming  into  their  own 
at  last!  No,  the  disharmonies  cannot  be  resolved.  But 
they  can  be  silenced.  Where  the  hope  of  a  rare  and 
difficult  happiness  ends,  peace  and  freedom  may  begin. 

IV.   Liliom 

Franz  Molnar's  Liliom — the  "Roughneck" — pre- 
sented by  the  Theatre  Guild  illustrates  with  extraordi- 
nary force  and  freshness  the  plasticity  of  dramatic 
form.  Instead  of  a  play  in  three  acts  or  four  we  have 
here  a  dramatic  "legend  in  seven  scenes  and  a  pro- 
logue." To  emphasize  this  matter  of  form  is  to  recall, 
of  course,  the  unteachableness  of  the  human  mind. 
Despite  the  theatre  of  the  Hindus,  the  Greeks,  the  medi- 
evals,  the  Elizabethans,  the  moderns,  your  average 
director,  critic,  playwright  believes  that  the  form  of 
the  drama  is  now  immutably  fixed.  He  has  substituted 
a  dead  formula  for  a  living  reality  and  guards  that 


68  The  American  Stage 

formula  with  belligerent  ardor.  Therefore  to  us,  at 
this  moment,  the  very  form  of  LUiom  has  a  special  and 
exhilarating  charm. 

That  form  was  used  in  a  tentative  way  by  Haupt- 
mann  in  Elga.  It  was  deliberately  cultivated  by  Frank 
Wedekind,  from  whose  works  the  Himgarian  Molnar 
undoubtedly  derives  it.  It  seeks  to  substitute  an  inner 
for  an  outer  continuity,  successive  crises  for  a  single 
one,  and  to  blend  chronicle  with  culmination.  It  takes 
the  crests  of  the  waves  of  life  as  the  objects  of  its 
vision.  The  last  wave  merges  into  the  indistinguish- 
able sea.  Film  technique  may  be  said  to  have  influ- 
enced this  form  or  even  the  chronicle  method  of  Shake- 
speare. But  it  does  not  select  its  episodes  to  tell  a 
story.  They  must  unfold  the  inner  fate  of  souls.  In 
Wedekind  and  the  expressionists  the  scenes  are  not 
only  symbolical  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  entire 
action  but  also  in  their  inner  character,  and  little  at- 
tempt is  made  to  preserve  the  homely  colors  of  life. 
What  makes  LUiom  so  attractive  is  that  Molnar  has 
avoided  this  extreme.  He  has  used  the  expressionist 
structure  and  rhythm;  the  content  of  his  scenes  is 
beautifully  faithful  to  the  texture  of  reality. 

Poor  Liliom,  barker  for  a  merry-go-round  in  an 
amusement  park,  what  is  he  but  once  more  the  eternal 
outcast,  wanderer,  unquiet  one?  He  hasn't  been  taught 
a  trade;  he  can't  settle  down  as  a  care-taker;  he  isn't 
canny  like  the  excellent  Berkowitz.    But  he  loves  Julie. 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions         69 

She  weeps  over  his  worthlessness  and  he  strikes  lier — 
strikes  her  out  of  misery,  to  flee  from  self-abasement, 
to  preserve  some  sort  of  superiority  and  so  some  liking 
for  himself.  She  is  to  have  a  child  and  something 
cosmic  and  elemental  tugs  at  the  bully's  heart.  Are 
love  and  fatherhood  only  for  the  canny  ones,  the  tread- 
ers  in  the  mill,  the  hewers  of  wood?  This  is  the  con- 
flict that  destroys  him.  He  is,  viewed  in  another  fash- 
ion, Everyman,  and  the  little  play,  which  has  its  shoddy, 
sentimental  patches,  is  a  sort  of  gay  and  rough  and 
pitiful  Divine  Comedy.  Liliom  did  not  ask  to  be  bom 
with  those  imperious  instincts  into  a  tight,  legalized, 
moral  world.  Society  demands  so  much  of  him  and 
gives  him  nothing  wherewith  to  fulfil  those  demands. 
The  world  process  has  not  even  given  him  brains  enough 
to  think  himself  beyond  demands  and  restrictions.  He 
struggles  with  his  body  and  nerves.  His  mind  is  docile. 
He  believes  that  he  is  a  sinner,  he  doesn't  doubt  that 
there  are  police  courts  in  heaven  as  there  are  on  earth, 
that  there  are  cleansing,  purgatorial  fires,  and  a  last 
chance,  maybe,  to  be  good.  But  neither  the  fires  of  hell 
nor  his  belief  in  them  have  power  to  change  the  essen- 
tial character  with  which  the  implacable  universe 
brought  him  forth.  His  notion  of  an  expiatory  action 
is  to  steal  a  star  from  the  sky  for  his  little  daughter. 
He  is  Liliom  still,  and  the  joke  is  on  the  order  with 
which  man  has  sought  to  snare  the  wild  cosmos.  The 
joke  is  on  a  man-made  world  and  a  man-made  heaven, 


70  The  American  Stage 

because  both  that  world  and  that  heaven  have  used 
force.  The  joke  is  not  on  Julie.  Julie  has  used  love. 
"There  are  blows  that  don't  hurt;  oh,  yes,  there  are 
blows  that  you  don't  feel."  Love  does  not  feel  the 
blows.  Love  does  not  demand  nor  coerce  nor  im- 
prison. Paradise  is  in  the  heart  of  love.  For  the  sake 
of  that  ending  you  forgive  Molnar  the  shoddy,  senti- 
mental little  patches,  for  the  sake  of  that  moment 
which  is  beautiful,  which  is  indeed  great. 

Among  the  many  admirable  productions  of  the  The- 
atre Guild  that  of  Liliom  may  unhesitatingly  be  classed 
first.  It  is  of  a  beautiful  perfection.  A  scrupulous 
respect  for  reality  is  combined  in  it  with  a  strong  and 
sober  imaginative  sense.  The  first  may  be  attributed 
to  the  direction  of  Mr.  Frank  Reicher.  He  was  brought 
up  in  a  school  where  veracity  was  understood  and  prac- 
tised as  in  no  other  period  of  theatrical  history.  The 
imaginative  lift  that  the  production  has  is  largely  due 
to  Mr.  Lee  Simonson.  Better  than  any  other  scenic 
artist  among  us  he  can  convey  the  sense  of  out-of- 
doors,  of  the  free  air,  of  gardens  and  horizons.  His 
spring  really  blooms,  his  autumn  is  russet  and  full  of 
melancholy.  His  railroad  embankment  in  the  fourth 
scene  is  a  triumph  of  the  imaginative  vision  of  reality, 
his  "courtroom  in  the  beyond"  of  an  airy,  restrained, 
compelling  fancy. 

The  actors  were  assisted  by  the  fact  that  the  direc- 
tors did  not  tamper  with  the  play.    Its  folk-character 


Four  Theatre  Guild  Productions        71 

is  preserved  and  so  its  people  retain  their  fine,  con- 
crete humanity.  Thus,  for  instance,  Miss  Eva  Le  Gal- 
lienne,  whose  impersonations  have  hitherto  been  slight 
and  faint  and  bloodless,  is  here  transformed  into  a 
peasant  girl,  awkward  and  rude  but  full  of  the  patience 
of  a  deep  passion  and  the  tenacity  of  a  noble  endur- 
ance. Mr.  Joseph  Schildkraut  fulfilled  all  the  expecta- 
tions that  were  entertained  of  him.  Once  or  twice  he 
forced  the  note  of  stubborn  impudence,  as  in  his  en- 
trance into  the  infernal  flames.  But  predominantly  his 
Liliom  is  memorably  racy,  vivid,  and  exact.  Miss 
Helen  Westley  surpasses  all  her  recent  performances 
in  a  part  that  demands  not  only  harshness  and  verve 
but  a  bitter  pathos  and  a  wise  relenting;  and  Mr.  Dud- 
ley Digges,  whose  portrait  of  The  Sparrow  is  a  little 
masterpiece  of  sly  rascality,  heightens  our  sense  of  his 
flexibility  and  insight.  And  it  would  be  ungrateful  not 
to  mention  the  no  less  excellent  accomplishment  in 
minor  parts  of  Hortense  Alden,  Henry  Travers,  Edgar 
Stehli,  and  Albert  Perry. 


Gorki  and  Arthur  Hopkins 

Whenever  the  characters  of  tragedy  dwell  in  their 
traditional  isolation,  the  inner  logic  of  the  play  must 
be  sustained  by  ascribing  their  misfortunes  wholly  to 
their  erring  wills.  But  once  that  isolation  is  broken, 
once  life  comes  streaming  in,  the  cold  ache  of  guilt 
yields  to  a  brotherly  community  in  suffering.  Such  is 
the  secret  of  Gorki's  technique  and  of  his  dramatic 
reasoning  in  Night  Lodging.  The  fierce,  eternal  little 
tragedy  of  love  and  jealousy  in  which  Michael  Ivanov 
and  Vassilisa,  Natasha,  and  Vaska  are  involved  does 
not  flare  in  the  void.  Nor  do  the  characters  who  sur- 
round them  serve  either  as  background  or  as  mere 
choric  witnesses.  The  coil  of  life  is  one.  Gorki  might 
have  written  another  play  about  the  same  people  and 
have  shifted  the  main  emphasis  upon  the  richly  indi- 
cated tragic  experiences  of  others  among  them.  And 
we  are,  indeed,  made  fully  aware  of  the  Actor's  life 
and  doom  and  can  build  up  imaginatively  the  entire 
fabric  of  all  these  other  lives.  There  are  no  subsidiary 
characters  in  this  drama,  as  there  are  none  in  reality. 
Each  soul  is  of  supreme  import  to  itself,  and  in  that 
dim  night  lodging  as  on  a  larger  and  less  shadowy 
scene  these  different  selves  struggle  for  some  realiza- 

72 


Gorki  and  Arthur  Hopkins  73 

tion  of  their  yearnings  both  in  the  world  of  things  and 
in  the  minds  of  their  fellows.  Nastia  and  the  Baron 
cry  out  in  bitter  pain  against  the  unbelief  that  meets 
their  romantic  stories.  But  it  is  not  these  stories  in 
themselves  that  they  are  concerned  for;  it  is  the  com- 
munication to  others  of  the  realities  of  their  inner 
lives.  For  only  so  can  they  mitigate  the  anguish  of 
their  futility  and  their  loneliness.  It  was  his  intimate 
perception  of  such  facts  that  led  Gorki  to  break  the  tra- 
ditional dramaturgic  pattern.  Each  man  is  the  pro- 
tagonist of  his  own  drama,  and  that  drama,  in  such  a 
world  as  the  present,  is  commonly  a  tragic  one.  There 
is  in  life  no  such  person  as  a  "first  citizen"  or  a  "second 
gentleman"  whose  function  ends  when  he  has  listened 
to  a  hero's  speech.  The  men  and  women  in  Night 
Lodging  have  and  sustain  an  intimate  vision  of  the 
course  of  the  central  tragedy.  But  ever  the  cries  of 
their  own  hearts  break  forth  and  silence  the  voices  of 
the  passions  that  contend  around  them.  Individual 
dramas  detach  themselves  from  the  general  rumor  of 
life  and  sink  back  into  it.  But  that  rumor  is  itself 
made  up  of  an  hundred  dramas  and  we  need  but  listen 
a  little  more  steadily  here  and  there  to  catch  the  tragic 
accents  of  each  one.  Hence  it  is  clear  that  the  flowing 
and  wavering  technique  of  this  play  is  not  due — as  we 
have  been  and  shall  be  glibly  told — to  a  neglect  of  right 
craftsmanship  or  to  unfamiliarity  with  the  theatre,  but 
to  a  closer  and  a  juster  vision  of  human  life. 


74  The  American  Stage 

Together  with  the  tradition  of  the  psychical  isolation 
of  a  tragic  action,  Gorki  also  abandons  that  of  its 
pseudo-nobility.  His  people  are  the  outcasts,  the  re- 
jected and  disinherited  of  the  old  Russian  order.  They 
drink  and  brawl  and  jeer.  But  they  also  sing  and 
yearn.  From  all  their  follies  and  futilities,  lifted  above 
their  degradation  and  their  woe,  rises  the  voice  of 
their  hope  "for  something  better."  Only  the  landlord 
and  policeman  are  content,  though  even  their  satisfac- 
tion in  a  little  power  and  brief  authority  is  touched  by 
the  ferocity  that  springs  from  fear.  The  others,  out 
of  these  lowest  depths,  are  still  striving  and,  like  the 
Actor,  make  their  final  exit  only  when  all  striving  seems 
quite  vain.  And  they  speak  of  the  desirable  not  as  a 
state  of  power  and  possession  but  as  a  state  of  free- 
dom, and  of  human  life  not  as  of  something  finished 
and  rigid  but  as  of  something  that  men  may  somehow 
understand  and  master  and  guide.  It  is  the  old  wan- 
derer Luka  who  has  come  very  near  to  solving  that 
mystery.  He  believes  them  all,  because  he  sees  beyond 
the  words  to  the  passions  of  their  speech.  He  under- 
stands them,  because  his  compassion  has  transcended 
all  the  common  categories  of  moral  judgment.  He  re- 
turns again  and  again  to  the  wonder  and  strangeness, 
the  terror  and  the  tragic  beauty  of  the  merely  human. 
"To  be  a  human  being — do  you  know  what  that  is?" 
To  know  that  fully  is  the  deepest  and  the  most  healing 
wisdom.    Luka  is  the  voice  of  that  new  spirit  which 


Gorki  and  Arthur  Hopkins  y^ 

Russia  has  brought  into  the  modern  world.  We  hear 
it  in  Dostoevski  as  we  hear  it  in  Gk>rki.  It  can  give 
beauty  and  reahty  to  words  that  would  sound  mawkish 
on  other  lips.  It  has  cast  aside  the  moral  values  which 
sustain  the  members  of  a  merely  economic  or  political 
hierarchy  in  their  self-esteem  and  their  several  sta- 
tions and  has  sought  man  in  his  simple  humanity,  hav- 
ing nothing  but  the  glow  of  his  passions,  the  pain  of 
his  heart,  the  aspiration  of  his  mind.  And  it  is  this 
spirit  that  makes  Night  Lodging  a  play  of  such  consol- 
ing and,  if  rightly  looked  upon,  of  such  cheering  power. 
Many  spectators,  including  the  best-known  reviewer  on 
our  daily  press,  have  found  it  unbearably  gloomy. 
They  see  the  shadows  on  the  damp  walls,  the  dusty 
sunlight  struggling  through  the  dim  window-panes,  the 
Tartar's  broken  arm,  the  vodka  glasses,  the  poverty, 
the  sin.  They  miss  prosperity  and  bright  raiment  and 
easy  falsehoods  and  fortunate  love.  They  do  not  hear 
the  faint  music  of  that  more  human  world  toward  which 
we  are  traveling,  toward  which  even  these  outcasts  had 
set  their  still  unseeing  faces — that  world  which  shall 
hold  all  men  in  freedom,  in  which  there  will  be  left  no 
spot  to  which  any  can  be  cast  out. 

We  owe  this  production,  as  we  owed  that  of  Tolstoi's 
Redemption,  to  Mr.  Arthur  Hopkins.  The  mere  state- 
ment constitutes,  in  the  present  condition  of  our  com- 
mercial stage,  a  measure  of  praise  and  gratitude  to 
which  nothing  need  be  added.    Nor  did  Mr.  Hopkins 


76  The  American  Stage 

stop  at  selecting  the  play.  He  strove  to  understand  it. 
An  unfamiliar  dramatic  rhythm  had  to  be  expressed. 
.The  pulsing  of  many  lives  had  to  be  indicated,  the  par- 
allel but  never  coincident  throb  of  many  passions,  the 
rise  and  submergence  of  the  more  vivid  central  action. 
All  that  has  been  more  than  adequately  achieved.  Only 
in  the  final  act  is  one  magnificent  moment — the  out- 
burst of  Satin — ^permitted  to  predominate  a  little  too 
emphatically,  and  one  suspects  a  touch  of  weariness 
on  the  manager's  part,  a  slight  impatience  after  the 
disappearance  of  Vaska  from  the  scene.  But  this  is 
a  very  minor  blemish.  The  players,  accustomed  to  the 
false  and  the  flashy,  literally  surpass  themselves.  Mr. 
Alan  Dinehart's  performance  is  far  from  being  the 
most  distinguished.  But  when  one  recalls  him  as  the 
singing  waiter  in  an  ephemeral  farce  and  then  sees  him 
here,  pale,  troubled,  brooding,  impassioned,  rising  to 
true  spiritual  expressiveness,  one  is  confirmed  in  an  old 
suspicion  that  it  is  not  the  actors  who  dictate  the  im- 
possible selections  of  our  stage.  Miss  Gilda  Varesi  as 
Vassilisa  is,  as  she  should  be,  acrid  and  turbulent.  But 
she  does  not  fail  to  sound  the  illuminating  and  elo- 
quent note  of  helplessness  in  the  face  of  her  own  strong 
passion.  Miss  Pauline  Lord,  whose  admirable  art  is 
seen  far  too  rarely,  has  the  grace  of  a  wild  abandon  as 
Nastia.  She  beats  against  the  invisible  bars  of  her 
cage  and  we  share  the  ache  of  her  wounded  heart  and 
hands.    Mr.  Edward  G.  Robinson  as  Satin  sulks  and 


Gorki  and  Arthur  Hopkins  yy 

smolders  until  the  word  of  liberation  comes  to  him 
and  then  rises  to  his  great  moment  with  a  fervor  not 
less  convincing  for  its  almost  lyrical  touch.  The  Actor 
of  Mr.  Edwin  Nicander  is  wan  and  subtle,  broken, 
strangely  humorous  and  pathetic;  the  Luka  of  Mr. 
W.  H.  Thompson  is  perfect  in  the  grace  of  kindli- 
ness, natural  wisdom,  and  unborrowed  dignity.  Thus 
sound  art  liberates  the  actor  no  less  than  the  spectator, 
and  truth  and  humanity  find  and  restore  us  to  our 
deeper  selves. 


A  Modern  Chronicle  Play 

It  is  the  dramaturgic  school  of  Scribe  and  Sarcey  which 
has  persuaded  both  the  wise  and  the  foolish  that  a  play 
must  be  tight  as  a  glove  and  orderly  as  a  machine.  But 
all  art  belongs  to  the  biological  and  spiritual  order  and 
its  forms  are  infinite  in  number  and  plasticity.  There 
are  good  plays  and  bad  ones,  but  none  that  are  not 
plays  because  they  fail  to  conform  to  a  convention  or 
a  pattern,  even  as  there  are  comely  faces  and  ugly 
faces,  but  none  that  are  not  faces  because  they  do  not 
coincide  with  some  anterior  conception  of  beauty. 
Hence  all  technical  objection  to  Mr.  John  Drinkwater's 
Abraham  Lincoln  may  be  set  aside  at  once.  It  "plays." 
Therefore  it  is  a  play.  It  is  a  chronicle  play,  a  "his- 
tory"; it  seeks  to  recreate  the  rhythm  of  life  by  meth- 
ods as  old  as  The  Life  and  Death  of  King  John  and  as 
new  as  Hauptmann's  Elga  and  A  Ballad  of  Winter. 
Most  modern  plays  have  returned,  for  the  sake  of  veri- 
similitude, to  the  pseudo-Aristotelian  unities  of  time 
and  place.  But  most  modern  plays  deal  with  single 
culminations  in  the  fates  of  men,  and  these  are,  by 
their  very  nature,  brief  and  strictly  localized.  Mr. 
Drinkwater  has  chosen  to  show  six  culminating  mo- 
ments in  Lincoln's  life,  and  since  each  of  the  six  scenes 

78 


A  Modern  Chronicle  Play  75 

has  its  own  unity  of  effect,  its  own  dramatic  life  and 
progression,  and  since  each  moves  toward  a  point  at 
which  historic  and  artistic  culmination  are  identical, 
the  stodgiest  technician  has  but  an  illusory  reason  for 
his  quarrel. 

The  strictures  of  the  historian,  who  can  justly  charge 
that  the  Lincoln  of  the  play  is  little  more  than  the 
Lincoln  of  popular  vayXh,  are  not  to  be  dismissed  so 
easily.  But  they  apply  to  the  play  only  as  a  written 
document.  In  the  acted  drama  the  intention  of  the 
author  is  luminously  clear.  Each  scene  of  Mr.  Drink- 
water's  play  is  not  only  a  crucial  episode  in  the  life  of 
Lincoln,  but  it  is  also  a  vision  of  the  struggle  of  a  great 
people,  through  which  the  tragic  character  of  all  mass 
conflict  is  symbolized  for  the  living  world.  The  inten- 
tion of  the  interpretative  third  scene — ^the  keystone  of 
this  whole  structure — should  have  escaped  no  one  even 
without  the  very  just  explanatory  note  which  Mr. 
Drinkwater  has  added  to  the  bill  of  the  play.  He  has 
tried,  as  he  truly  points  out,  to  lend  "heightened  sig- 
nificance to  a  certain  strain  in  Lincoln's  character  and 
to  certain  movements  and  tendencies  in  the  human 
mind  that  he  led  and  directed."  What  is  that  strain 
and  what  are  those  tendencies?  Both  may  be  summed 
up  in  a  brief  phrase:  Mercy  is  justice.  The  Abraham 
Lincoln  of  the  play  is  an  uncouth,  kindly,  humorous 
man  of  the  people,  careless  of  all  things  save  his  spir- 
itual vision,  tolerant  in  all  things  that  do  not  seek  to 


$0  The  American  Stage 

break  the  essential  rectitude  of  his  mind.  He  knows 
nothing  of  personal  enmity,  nothing  of  tribal  hatred. 
He  rebukes  the  fierce  shallowness  that  would  humiliate 
the  enemy  or  crush  him.  He  is  stricken  with  horror 
at  the  thought  of  war  becommg  a  "blood-feud."  His 
ideal  is  to  keep  the  vision  inviolate  without  war.  If 
war  does  come,  its  aim  shall  be  to  defend  the  vision, 
not  to  destroy  the  foe.  He  is  firm  when  others  are  only 
stubborn,  steadfast  when  they  are  belligerent,  mag- 
nanimous when  they  are  vengeful.  And  this  symboli- 
cal portrait  of  him  has  not  only,  as  a  whole,  the  "imag- 
inative lucidity"  which  Mr.  Drinkwater  claims  for  it, 
but  also  a  high  moral  value  for  a  world  stricken  by  the 
same  diseases  that  men  were  suffering  from  in  Lin- 
coln's day. 

The  chief  faults  in  Mr.  Drinkwater's  execution  can 
be  easily  and  briefly  marked.  An  Englishman,  writing 
a  play  of  American  folk-history,  he  was  highly  con- 
scious of  the  daring  and  difficulty  of  his  task.  Some  of 
this  arduous  self-consciousness  has  been  communicated 
to  his  characters.  In  hours  of  moral  conflict  and  de- 
cisive action  the  heat  and  glow  of  life  dim  the  future 
wholly.  But  Lincoln  is,  especially  in  the  earlier  scenes, 
too  aware  of  his  historic  mission  and  character  and  of 
the  judgment  of  posterity.  He  seems  at  moments  to 
be  subtly  acting  up  to  Mr.  Drinkwater's  retrospective 
interpretation  of  him.  The  symbolical  intention  thus 
tends,  quite  often,  not  to  irradiate  the  density  of  life. 


A  Modern  Chronicle  Play  Sil 

but  to  disperse  it.  Against  the  resultant  thinness  of 
effect  Mr.  Drinkwater  has  sought  to  guard  by  the  addi- 
tion of  folk-characters.  But  the  invention  of  these  has 
not  been  happy.  The  Farmer  and  the  Storekeeper  are 
not  people,  but  devices  of  exposition;  Mrs.  Lincoln  is 
not  a  woman,  but  two  contradictory  qualities;  the 
maid  in  the  Lincoln  household  is  amusingly  British. 
The  two  council-chamber  scenes  and  the  scene  at  Appo- 
mattox are  the  purest  in  quality  of  effect  because  they 
are  freest  of  the  effort  to  supply  imaginatively  what 
only  first-hand  experience  can  make  authentic.  A  little 
•  history  is  a  dangerous  thing;  pure  poetry  is  truer. 
The  production  of  this  play  stands  or  falls,  of  course, 
with  the  ability  of  the  actor  who  takes  the  central  part. 
It  would  have  been  impossible  to  receive  the  impres- 
sions here  recorded,  had  Mr.  Frank  McGljmn  been  less 
than  adequate.  And  his  task  was  a  staggering  one. 
It  is  difficult  enough  to  interpret  the  protagonist  of  the 
ordinary  biographical  play  under  the  severe  and  jealous 
eye  of  the  historian  and  the  specialist.  But  every 
American  is,  in  a  sense,  a  specialist  on  Lincoln.  He  is 
not  only  a  folk-hero,  but  one  with  whom  men  still  liv- 
ing walked  and  spoke,  and  who  is  bound  to  the  entire 
present  generation  by  an  immediate  and  a  verbal  tra- 
dition. Through  a  single  obviously  false  note  in  his 
performance  Mr.  McGlynn  could  have  become,  with 
fatal  ease,  absurd  and  offensive.  But  his  performance, 
however  incorrect  historically  in  this  detail  or  that,  has 


82  Tme  American  Stage 

a  final  rigHtness  and  harmony  of  effect.  It  may  not 
convince  the  conscience  of  the  scholar  and  the  eye- 
witness. It  cannot  offend  the  heart  and  mind  of  the 
most  fastidious  beholder.  Mr.  McGlynn  has  a  simple, 
a  humble  dignity;  he  has  gleams  of  quiet  humor  and 
moments  of  stern  enough  determination.  But  his  de- 
termination avoids  the  shadow  of  truculence;  his  humor 
glints  but  on  the  edge  of  sadness;  his  kindliness  never 
sinks  to  the  over-soft.  He  has  the  correct  height  and 
narrowness  of  person.  He  is  ungainly  without  being 
ignoble,  loose-limbed  but  knitted  from  within.  If  there 
is  a  touch  of  the  merely  sentimental  in  his  posture  at  ♦ 
the  end  of  the  first  scene,  it  is  because  the  dramatist 
has  asked  the  impossible.  A  lank,  bearded  man  in  a 
frock-coat,  kneeling  in  prayer  beside  the  "parlor"  lamp, 
recalls  the  conventicle  and  the  evangelist,  not  the  fol- 
lower of  Jesus  and  the  friend  of  man.  In  the  fifth 
•scene,  on  the  other  hand,  Mr.  McGl5mn  reaches  the 
highest  point  of  his  performance  through  silence.  Lin- 
coln spends  the  night  propped  up  on  chairs  in  Grant's 
headquarters  at  Appomattox.  To  that  weary  figure, 
grotesquely  garbed,  resting  uneasily  from  so  much  sor- 
rowful endurance,  Mr.  McGlynn  has  succeeded  in  giv- 
ing sadness,  loneliness,  a  grave  beauty  of  the  spirit,  a 
homely,  magnanimity,  a  visionary  touch  of  the  tragic 
end  to  come.  This  is  Lincoln  as  the  heart  of  man  con- 
ceives him. 

We  have  here  neither  a  great  play  nor  a  great  per- 


A  Modern  Chronicle  Play  83 

f ormance.  Both  seek  and  gain — omitting  all  faults  and 
inadequacies,  of  execution — ^such  adventitious  aids  to 
interest  and  impressiveness  as  the  highest  and  most 
enduring  art  avoids.  The  historical  hero  is  too  much 
enmeshed  in  the  particular  which  is  transitory  and  not 
sufficiently  enmeshed  in  those  concrete  things  which 
are  not  transitory  because  they  have  a  touch  of  the 
universal  fate  of  man.  In  the  realm  of  art  Hamlet  and 
Faust  are  greater  and  truer  than  Napoleon  or  Lincoln. 
But  to  our  stage  of  to-day  Abraham  Lincoln  is  bread 
and  wine  amid  a  glut  of  painted  sweets  and  brackish 
water. 


The  Tyranny  of  Love 

It  was  on  April  25,  1891,  that  a  play  called  Amour- 
euse  had  its  first  performance  at  the  Odeon  in  P^s. 
The  author,  Georges  de  Porto-Riche,  who  was  even 
then  forty-two  years  old,  had  contributed  a  one-act 
play,  La  Chance  de  Frangoise,  to  the  repertory  of  the 
Theatre  Libre  three  years  before,  and  had  also  written 
a  one-act  play  in  verse.  He  had  tried  his  hand  at  lyr- 
ical poetry  but  without  conspicuous  success.  Nor  did 
he  cultivate  or  greatly  extend  the  reputation  which 
came  to  him  immediately  upon  the  appearance  of 
Amour euse.  Neither  Le  Passi  (1897)  nor  Le  VieU 
Homme  (1911)  shows  any  development  of  his  mind  or 
art.  He  seems  himself  to  have  been  aware  of  the  early 
exhaustion  of  his  vein,  for  in  1898  he  published  his 
four  pla)^  under  the  very  appropriate  title  Theatre 
d' Amour  and  made  no  further  attempt  at  dramatic  com- 
position for  fourteen  years.  His  fame,  which  presents 
every  appearance  of  solidity  and  permanence,  rests  es- 
sentially on  the  three-act  drama  of  domestic  life 
Amour  euse,  which  was  produced  for  the  first  time  in 
English  on  February  28,  192 1,  at  the  Bijou  Theatre 
under  the  title  The  Tyranny  of  Love. 
The  unrivaled  excellence  of  Amour  euse  in  its  own 

84 


The  Tyranny  of  Love  85 

field  is  due  to  two  facts:  it  exhausts  its  subject;  its 
progression  and  outcome  are  conditioned  neither  by 
technical  exigencies  nor  by  the  use  of  moral  fictions, 
but  conform  utterly  to  the  native  dictates  of  the  human 
heart.  It  is  as  fresh  and  pertinent  to-day  as  it  was  on 
its  first  appearance  thirty  years  ago;  to  witness  its 
performance  is  to  reaffirm  and  re-experience  in  one's 
own  mind  the  conviction  that  depth  and  exactness  of 
veracity  constitutes  the  highest  beautj''  in  literature; 
it  touches  one's  memory  even  of  Heartbreak  House 
with  a  tinge  of  the  over-eager  and  falsely  pointed  and 
sets  into  relief  the  over-consciousness  and  calculated 
symmetry  even  of  The  Skin  Game;  it  makes  all  lesser 
plays  seem  like  the  trivial  and  childish  fables  they  are. 
Its  scrupulous  perfection  shows  up  their  easy  vul- 
garity. 

speciosis  condere  rebus 
carmina  vulgatum  est  opus  et  componere  simplex. 

What  distinguishes  Porto-Riche  is  his  insight  into 
the  curiosities  of  love,  into  the  difficulties  of  the  heart. 
The  conflict  between  Dr.  Etienne  Feriaud  and  his  wife 
Germaine  is  the  eternal  one  between  the  man  of  cre- 
ative temper  to  whom  love  is  excitement  in  youth  and 
repose  in  later  years,  and  the  woman  to  whom  the  sat- 
isfactions of  love  in  the  broadest  sense  are  coextensive 
.with  the  content  and  meaning  of  life.  "It  is  they  whom 
you  jeer  at,"  Dr.  Feriaud  exclaims,  "it  is  the  scientists. 


86  The  American  Stage 

the  artists,  and  the  poets  who  have  bettered  this  imper- 
fect world  and  made  it  more  endurable.  Doubtless 
they  have  been  bad  husbands,  indifferent  friends,  rebel- 
lious sons.  Does  it  matter?  Their  labors  and  their 
dreams  have  strewn  happiness,  justice,  and  beauty  over 
the  earth.  They  have  not  been  kind  lovers,  these  ego- 
ists, but  they  have  created  love  for  those  who  come 
after  them."  Germaine,  however,  cannot  make  the 
distinction  between  a  service  of  self  for  its  own  sake 
and  the  service  of  a  self  that  is  identified  with  a  great 
cause.  She  is  jealous  of  her  husband's  work,  of  his 
very  thoughts;  she  desires  to  contract  his  interests  to 
the  preoccupations  of  love  and  reduce  his  activities  to 
the  feeding  of  her  ever-famished  heart.  She  has  her 
case,  which  Porto- Riche  permits  her  to  state  with  tell- 
ing eloquence.  She  has  not  had  adventure  and  ro- 
mance. Her  absorbing  adventure  and  romance  are  here 
and  now.  But  she  makes  the  grave  error  of  thinking 
that  adventure  and  romance  can  be  pervasive  elements 
of  life — Tiot  white  days  and  their  memoriies  but  years 
and  continuous  presences.  Her  exactions  first  rasp  and 
then  chill  her  husband.  "I  suffocate  morally  and  phys- 
ically," he  cries  out.  "I  must  be  free."  She  "rum- 
mages in  his  brain  as  one  rummages  in  drawers."  She 
diminishes  the  preciousness  of  love  by  her  eagerness 
and  the  haste  of  her  consents.  She  thus  drives  him 
into  a  mood  of  supreme  rebellion  and  disgust.  Yet 
from  that  moment  and  its  irreparable  consequences 


The  Tyranny  of  Love  87 

springs  for  him  that  revenge  of  life  itself  which  she 
predicts.  Though  all  seems  over  between  them,  he  re- 
turns. Nervous  disquietude  and  jealousy  have  drawn 
him  back.  It,  is  Germaine  who  utters  a  warning  at 
last:  "But  we  shall  not  be  happy."  The  cry  does  not 
stir  him.  People  are  not  happy.  They  are  united  by 
the  very  wounds  they  have  inflicted  on  each  other. 
Life  is  passion,  conflict,  resignation,  and,  at  best,  peax:e. 

No  brief  account  can  do  justice  to  the  dialogue  of 
Porto-Riche,  which  combines  an  elegiac  beauty  of 
rhythm  with  entire  naturalness  and  an  inexhaustible 
wealth  of  psychological  observation.  Not  every  artist 
has  mastered  all  the  intricacies  of  an  emotional  or 
spiritual  situation  because  he  has  known  it  well  enough 
for  effective  presentation.  Porto-Riche  knows  his  situ- 
ation to  the  most  fleeting  of  impulses,  the  faintest  reac- 
tion of  the  mind,  the  ultimate  quiver  of  the  nerves.  He 
knows  it  so  well  that  he  transcends  the  second  stage  of 
insight  at  which  the  consciousness  of  complexity  clogs 
the  processes  of  art.  He  sees  not  only  completely  but 
with  supreme  clarity  and  order.  To  hear  his  dialogue 
is  a  liberal  education  in  the  character  of  art  and  the 
more  difficult  art  of  life. 

We  owe  this  production  of  The  Tyranny  of  Love  to 
the  good  taste  and  admirable  courage  of  Mr.  Henry 
Baron.  He  uses  a  translation  of  his  own  which  is  not 
always  elegant  and  idiomatic  but  which  is  faithful  and 
complete.    It  is  a  pity  that  he  thought  a  superficial 


88      •  The  American  Stage 

change  of  scene  and  nomenclature  necessary.  But  the 
very  superficiality  of  the  attempt  keeps  it  from  being 
very  annoying.  The  play  is  authentically  before  us. 
And  the  acting  is  more  than  adequate.  Mr.  Flateau 
is  a  bit  sullen  and  heavy  and  Mr.  Cyril  Keightly  not 
quite  free  from  mannerism.  But  both  have  grasped 
their  parts  with  great  intelligence  and  sincerity.  Miss 
Estelle  Winwood  reveals  herself  as  an  emotional  actress 
of  extraordinary  genuineness,  charm,  and  force.  The 
success  or  failure  of  this  production  will  give  us  the 
measure  of  the  theatrical  taste  about  us.  For  it  con- 
stitutes nothing  less  than  a  first-rate  interpretation  of 
the  best  modern  play  of  the  entire  season. 


According  to  Sarcey 

It  was  during  the  two  decades  from  1870  to  1890  that 
Francisque  Sarcey,  with  an  amazing  vigor  and  re- 
sourcefulness of  mind,  established  the  theory  of  the 
theatre  as  a  mechanism,  a  puzzle,  and  a  game.  He  ab- 
stracted his  theory  from  the  practice  of  Scribe  and 
Sardou,  stiffened  and  tightened  it  beyond  the  use  of 
his  models,  and  applied  it  to  Sophocles  and  Shake- 
speare, Moliere  and  Ibsen.  This  thing,  he  declared, 
was  "of  the  theatre";  that  was  not.  He  insisted  on  the 
rigor  of  the  game  he  had  invented  and  reduced  the  cre- 
ative art  of  the  drama  to  a  base,  mechanic  exercise. 
Since  his  theory  deals  exclusively  with  the  effectiveness 
of  one  narrow  variety  of  form  and  since  his  interest  in 
substance  and  its  development  from  within  was  prac- 
tically nil,  he  kept  the  theatre  both  barren  and  static 
and  richly  deserved  as  his  epitaph  the  severe  judgment 
of  Lanson:  "Au  lieu  d'aider  la  foule  a  s'affranchir,  il 
la  flattait  dans  la  mediocrite  de  ses  gouts." 

Why  talk  about  "Papa"  Sarcey  to-day?  Because  he 
is  with  us.  He  is  our  neighbor  at  the  playhouse,  our 
vis-a-vis  at  dinner,  the  critic  in  our  class-rooms  and  on 
our  hearth.  When  Mr.  Clayton  Hamilton  extols  the 
technique  of  Pinero  he  talks  pure  Sarcey;  when  learned 

89 


90  The  American  Stage 

professors  lecture  of  the  scene  a  faire  and  refuse  to 
singe  their  well-kept  plumage  on  the  fires  of  Haupt- 
mann  or  Shaw,  they  are  promulgating  the  same  faith; 
when,  some  years  ago,  the  National  Institute  of  Arts 
and  Letters  elected  Mr.  Augustus  Thomas  as  its  pres- 
ident and  presented  to  him  a  gold  medal  for  "his  life 
work  in  the  drama" — there  was  old  Sarcey  enthroned 
and  declared  an  immortal.  And  the  tradition  persists. 
Listen  to  the  chatter  of  the  pla)nvrights  on  Forty- 
second  Street.  They  do  not  create  their  plays  in  secret. 
They  "make"  them  in  collaboration  during  week-end 
trips  to  Atlantic  City;  their  highest  ambition  is  to  bring 
back  an  article  that  is  "well-made." 

It  is  not  difficult  to  account  for  the  persistence  and 
popularity  of  the  theory  of  the  "well-made"  play. 
There  are  ninety-nine  men  who  can  mend  a  machine  to 
one  who  can  write  a  lyric;  there  are  nine  hundred  and 
ninety-nine  who  can  superintend  the  manufacture  of 
sulphuric  acid  to  one  who  can  gain  a  new  insight  into 
the  problem  of  matter.  Ingenuity  is  plentiful,  creative 
vision  is  rare.  The  theory  of  the  "well-made"  play  in- 
stalled the  ingenious  as  lords  of  the  theatre  and  dis- 
credited the  creative  energy  of  the  great  masters  at 
the  expense  of  their  supposed  craftsmanship.  It 
opened  the  doors  of  dramatic  art  to  the  type  of  mind 
that  likes  to  solve  conundrums  and  disentangle  puzzles 
and  invent  a  new  can-opener  and  treat  the  business  of 
both  literature  and  life  with  astuteness,  deftness,  and 


According  to  Sarcey  91 

decorum.  Successful  playwrights  needed  now  no 
longer  to  be  born.  Cheerful  mediocrity  could  learn  all 
the  tricks  of  a  smooth  "facture";  the  superficially  ob- 
served stuff  of  life  furnished  merely  the  pawns  for  the 
game,  the  threads  for  the  pattern,  the  rigid  little  blocks 
for  the  skilful  structure.  Thus  arose  the  school  orf 
draCmatic  writing  that  marched  toward  its  big  scenes 
by  the  road  of  lost  letters  and  sudden  encounters  and 
stolen  weapons  and  overheard  conversations  and  hidden 
wills  and  exotic  inheritances,  which  refurbished  the 
ancient  trick  of  indistinguishable  twins,  borrowed  the 
latest  sleight-of-hand  of  the  medium  and  the  clairvoy- 
ant, and  made  Mr.  Augustus  Thomas  the  dean  of 
American  dramatists. 

Mr.  Thomas's  new  play,  Nemesis,  is  the  logical  suc- 
cessor of  The  Witching  Hour  and  Palmy  Days.  The 
modem  drama,  on  both  its  naturalistic  and  neo-roman- 
tic  sides,  has  not  left  him  wholly  untouched.  He  has 
felt  a  change  in  the  times  and  been  stirred  by  a  gentle 
ambition  to  change  with  them.  During  two  acts  of 
Nemesis,  even  though  the  elderly  silk-merchant  and 
his  young  wife  and  the  French  sculptor  are  but  vague 
and  well-worn  types,  one  is  almost  persuaded  that  Mr. 
Thomas  is  interested  in  some  fundamental  facts  of  hu- 
man nature.  But  when,  toward  the  end  of  the  second 
act,  the  silk-merchant  slyly,  but  in  careful  view  of  the 
.  audience,  pilfers  and  secretes- a  bit  of  clay  bearing  the 
sculptor's  finger-prints,  we  know  that  the  great  game 


92  The  American  Stage 

is  on.  Character  and  fate  and  vision  are  dropped. 
Now  comes  the  triumph  of  ingenuity.  What  will  the 
merchant  do  with  the  sculptor's  finger-prints?  V/ell, 
he  has  them  transferred  to  rubber  stamps  and  forces 
his  wife  to  summon  the  sculptor  to  their  house.  There- 
upon this  gentleman  of  spotless  life,  addicted  as  we  are 
told,  to  the  North  American  Review  and  the  American 
Journal  of  Economics,  stabs  the  lady  to  death  with  the 
calm  precision  of  a  stock-yard  butcher,  wipes  the  dag- 
ger, the  table,  the  door-knobs  with  a  kerchief,  and  care- 
fully imprints  on  all  these  objects  the  finger-prints  of 
the  sculptor.  There  follows  a  trial  scene  in  the  Court 
of  General  Sessions,  written  and  produced  with  con- 
summate imitative  skill  in  all  the  external  details  of 
reality,  and  a  final  moment  outside  of  the  Sing  Sing 
gates.  There  is  no  happy  ending.  And  for  that  one 
might  be  grateful,  were  it  not  that  Mr.  Thomas  uses 
a  raw  shock  to  the  sensibilities  merely  to  enforce  his 
belief  that  the  one  kind  of  circumstantial  evidence  com- 
monly held  to  be  incontrovertible  may  land  an  innocent 
man  in  the  electric  chair.  This  preoccupation  of  his, 
creditable  no  doubt  to  the  man  and  the  citizen,  is 
artistically  of  an  incurable  externality.  But  from  the 
point  of  view  of  Sarcey  and  the  "well-made"  play,  it 
provides  his  ingenuity  with  a  bundle  of  new  and  effec- 
tive devices.  For  to  this  school  of  dramaturgy  things 
and  their  accidental  collisions  take  the  place  of  pas- 
sions and  their  fatalities. 


'According  to  Sarcey  93 

The  reason  for  paying  even  so  much  attention  to  a 
negligible  melodrama  is  the  same  for  which  we  recalled 
the  theory  of  Sarcey.  The  full  hope  of  the  American 
drama  will  not  be  realized  until  that  theory  and  the 
resultant  practice  are  far  more  thoroughly  discredited 
among  intelligent  people  than  they  are  to-day;  until 
it  is  vitally  understood,  despite  noisy  reputations  both 
critical  and  theatric,  that  no  creative  mind  is  an  ingeni- 
ious  mind,  that  no  noble  play  is  either  "built"  or 
"made"  but  grows  in  the  still  chambers  of  the  watch- 
ful soul,  that  the  school  of  Sarcey  continues  still  to 
produce  plays  in  which,  as  Musset  justly  remarked  long 
ago, 

I'intrigue,  enlacee  et  roulee  en  feston, 
Tourne  comme  un  rebus  autour  d'un  mirliton. 


Pity  and  Terror 
I 

The  night  of  Monday,  October  lo,  192 1,  was  a  mem- 
orable one  in  the  history  both  of  the  American  stage 
and  of  the  American  drama.  It  brought  us  Clemence 
Dane's  A  Bill  of  Divorcement,  Karl  Schonherr's  Chil- 
dren's Tragedy,  and  Arthur  Richman's  Ambush.  The 
morning  and  afternoon  of  October  11  were  far  less 
happy  moments  in  the  progress  of  American  dramatic 
criticism.  The  most  distinguished  of  our  evening  pa- 
pers observed  that  Schonherr's  Kindertragodie  was 
"not  pleasant  to  contemplate"  and  that  Ambush  has 
a  "miserable  end."  Another  contemporary  wondered, 
in  regard  to  Ambush,  whether  it  was  necessary  for  the 
American  drama  "to  go  through  the  drab  and  dispirit- 
ing Manchester  stage";  a  third  declared  of  the  pro- 
tagonist of  that  play  that  "nobody  loves  a  weakling." 
It  is  clear  that  American  criticism  cannot  lead  or  guide 
our  creative  life  when  it  is  necessary  to  remind  its 
busiest  and  most  vocal  practitioners  of  so  elementary 
a  thing  as  Aristotle's  remark  that  "we  contemplate 
with  pleasure,  and  with  the  more  pleasure  the  more 
exactly  they  are  imitated,  such  objects  as,  if  real,  we 
could  not  see  without  pain."    The  reviewers  made  a 

94 


Pity  and  Terror  9^ 

great  deal  of  the  imperfect  acting  in  Mr.  Arnold  Daly's 
production  of  The  Children's  Tragedy.  It  was  indeed 
faulty  enough.  They  made  nothing  of  that  magnificent 
integrity  and  courage  of  his  which  returns  again  and 
again  to  an  attack  upon  our  dramatic  "forts  of  folly" 
and  now  brought  us  the  pure,  severe,  unfaltering  beauty, 
the  dread  and  depth  of  Schonherr's  little  masterpiece. 
But  the  American  drama  is  closer  to  us  and  more  impor- 
tant. And  we  have  an  American  tragedy  at  last.  We 
have  Arthur  Richman's  Ambush. 

The  character  of  tragic  fatality  shifts  from  age  to 
age  with  the  shifting  views  that  men  hold  concerning 
the  nature  of  the  universe  and  their  destiny  in  it.  The 
arbitrariness  of  the  gods  yields  to  the  will  and  law  of 
God,  and  that,  in  its  turn,  yields  to  the  immanent  laws 
of  heredity  and  the  cruelties  of  the  social  order.  But 
there  is  a  third  and,  closely  considered,  an  even  pro- 
founder  because  less  debatable  source  of  tragic  fatality. 
It  is  that  which  arises  from  the  sheer  and  unfathom- 
able diversities  of  human  character  as  given.  Here 
there  is  no  place  for  theoretic  subtlety  and  the  dramatic 
idea  cannot  be  invalidated  by  discoveries  in  medicine  or 
revolutions  in  society.  The  appeal  is  purely  to  human 
experience.  And  if  that  appeal  is  broad  and  deep 
enough  the  dramatic  idea  is  safe  amid  whatever  change 
of  doctrines  or  institutions  may  come  to  pass.  Such  is 
the  appeal  which  Mr.  Richman  has  made.  And  he  has 
made  it  with  a  power  and  poignancy,  an  honesty  of 


96  The  American  Stage 

mind,  a  richness  of  spiritual  circumstance  and  a  fru- 
gality in  the  use  of  external  device  that  are  plainly 
unique  and  plainly  epoch-making  in  the  history  of  the 
American  drama. 

I  not  only  see  Walter  Nichols,  the  clerk  who  lives  in 
Jersey  City;  I  see  his  story,  as  Mr.  Richman  would 
have  us  see  it,  through  Nichols's  eyes.  The  man  is  not 
extraordinarily  intelligent  and  not  at  all  articulate.  He 
thinks  he  is  old-fashioned,  and  that  word  helps  him 
out  in  a  blundering  way.  But  he  is  old-fashioned  only 
as  all  depth  and  fineness  and  integrity  seems  to  raw- 
ness and  shallowness,  and  as  the  tempered  and  circum- 
spect will  must  always  seem  to  those  who  wreak  their 
desires  unreflectingly  upon  the  world.  Walter  Nithols 
is  in  truth,  as  that  reviewer  remarked,  weak.  He  is 
weak  because  the  gods  themselves,  in  Schiller's  old 
saying,  fight  in  vain  against  vulgarity  of  the  soul.  He 
is  not  only  weak.  He  is  purblind.  He  has  lived  with 
his  wife  Harriet  for  nearly  twenty  years  and  has  not 
known  her.  He  is,  in  the  deeper  sense,  not  capable  of 
knowing  her.  Even  at  the  end  of  the  withering  revela- 
tions which  the  action  chronicles,  even  in  the  lowest 
depth  of  that  abasement  and  despair  into  which  she 
has  thrust  him,  he  does  not  know  her  from  within. 
He  is  weak.  The  ideal  kills.  The  mind  that  considers 
all  things  and  weighs  the  issues  of  life  delicately  and 
distrusts  brutal  conclusions  and  fears  to  act  because  it 
fears  that  action  may  be  an  affront  or  a  wound — that 


Pity  and  Terror  97 

mind  is  weak  in  battling  with  the  children  of  the  world 
and  is  unpractical  and  unsuccessful  and  is  a  fool's  mind 
according  to  the  judgment  of  streets  and  market-places. 
Often,  as  in  the  case  of  Walter  Nichols,  it  hesitates  to 
resist  evil  because  it  does  not  recognize  that  evil  and 
is  overcome.  But  it  is  overcome  only  outwardly.  In 
his  extreme  misery  and  shame  Walter  Nichols  remains 
himself,  bearing  an  inner  witness  to  all  he  is  forced  to 
abandon. 

The  ruthless  will  that  ensnares  and  drags  him  down 
is  fitly  embodied  in  two  women,  his  wife  and  daughter. 
For  it  is  true,  however  commonplace,  that  in  woman 
volition  is  directer  and  more  elementary  in  every  direc- 
tion than  in  man.  The  will  of  woman  suffers  more  re- 
signedly but  also  acts  more  relentlessly.  To  Harriet 
Nichols  and  to  Margaret,  the  daughter,  life  has  nar- 
rowed itself  to  the  mere  absence  of  ease  and  pleasure 
and  of  mean  success.  They  repeat  quite  glibly  and 
honestly  the  formulas  of  their  moral  order.  And  they 
try  to  observe — the  older  woman  more  than  the 
younger — a  certain  prudence  and  to  stay,  as  Mr.  Rich- 
man  points  out  with  terrible  irony,  on  this  side  of  such 
degradation  as  may  involve  suffering  and  want.  But 
the  world  is  mere  food  for  the  voracity  of  their  desires. 
Only  because,  until  the  last  possible  moment,  they 
shield  those  desires  behind  the  conventional  forms  of 
life,  are  they  able  to  deceive  and  scheme  and  conquer. 
Had  they  beai  frank  they  would  have  been  at  once 


98  The  American  Stage 

less  ignoble  and  less  destructive.  They  lie  in  the  am- 
bush of  respectability  and  conventionality.  The  ideal 
threatens  to  balk  their  desires.  They  leap  forth  and 
destroy.  Thus  the  dramatic  idea  is  here  identical  with 
the  very  forces  that  make  life.  A  play  in  which  that 
identity  is  established  is  tragedy. 

II 

We  are  not  moved  by  the  remediable;  we  are  not 
moved  by  the  accidental;  we  are  not  moved  by  unre- 
lieved moral  ugliness.  It  may  be  urged  that  nothing 
is  remediable.  Absolutely  speaking,  that  is  true.  At 
the  end  of  every  discussion  of  the  character  of  a  tragic 
action  we  meet  the  problem  of  choice.  Though  nothing 
is  easier  than  to  dispose  of  the  will  as  a  separable  entity, 
we  must  still  reckon  with  the  unalterable  subjective 
conviction  which  the  spectator  projects  into  the  people 
on  the  stage  that  within  some  limits,  however  narrow, 
a  freedom  of  choice  exists.  The  perfect  tragic  action 
convinces  us  of  the  gradual  obliteration  of  that  margin 
of  choice.  In  such  a  play  as  Henri  Bernstein's  La 
Griff e  {The  Claw),  for  instance,  as  in  many  plays  of 
that  particular  French  school,  we  are  constantly  irked 
by  the  conviction  that  the  tragic  protagonist  could 
have  arrested  his  ruin;  that,  on  the  pla)r5vright's  own 
showing,  there  were  forces  present  and  alive  within 
the  man  which  we  would,  in  his  place,  have  summoned. 
That  process  of  identification  is  inevitable.    On  it  is 


Pity  and  Terror  99 

based  the  convincingness  or  the  reverse  of  every  imag- 
inative representation  of  life.  If,  when  we  have  granted 
a  character  every  inner  difficulty,  every  natural  weak- 
ness, every  malevolence  of  fate,  we  still  feel  that  given 
his  situation  we  could  have  rescued  ourselves,  the  level 
of  the  action  in  which  he  is  involved  falls  below  that 
of  tragedy.  So  soon  as  we  instinctively  interpose  be- 
tween the  hero  and  his  downfall  a  certain  remedy  pity 
and  terror  flee  and  fatality  turns  into  mere  disaster. 
What  is  true  of  the  remediable  is  true  in  a  far  higher 
degree  of  the  accidental.  In  the  world,  which  is  a 
world  of  causality,  there  is  obviously  nothing  that  cor- 
responds to  what  people  loosely  call  accident.  In  the 
world  of  the  representative  and  interpretative  imagina- 
tion all  reasonableness  and  all  convincingness  is  derived 
from  the  artist's  perfect  control  over  the  various  strands 
of  moral  and  physical  causality  that  weave  the  tragic 
web.  To  resort  to  accident,  that  is,  to  the  frankly  ob- 
scure and  unexplained,  is  to  sacrifice  the  intellectual 
seriousness  of  your  action  at  once.  That  is  why  Clem- 
ence  Dane's  A  Bill  of  Divorcement  does  not,  despite  its 
earnestness  and  power,  impress  me  as  being  of  a  tragic 
character.  It  may  be  that  after  fifteen  years  of  hope- 
less insanity  a  man  can  suddenly  regain  his  reason. 
But  the  proof  of  an  action  or  event  must  be,  as  David 
Hume  pointed  out  long  ago,  strong  in  direct  proportion 
to  its  improbability.  Miss  Dane  has  not  troubled  to 
supply  that  proof.    That,  finally,  the  suddenly  recov- 


100  The  American  Stage 

ered  man  should  wander  into  his  old  home  on  the  very 
Christmas  day  on  which  his  wife  has  at  last  determined 
to  end  her  long  solitariness,  is  to  precipitate  a  tragic 
crisis  not  from  within  its  natural  elements  but  from  an 
alien  and  extraneous  source.  Some  allowance  must  in- 
deed be  made  for  the  conventionalization  of  time  and 
space  which  the  drama  demands.  But  it  is  the  unwise 
pla5rwright  who  accentuates  this  unavoidable  artifice 
by  the  use  of  festivals  and  anniversaries  and  coinci- 
dences so  perfect  as  to  challenge  belief  at  once. 

The  question  of  moral  ugliness  is  a  more  subtle  and 
debatable  one.  It  has  little  to  do  with  any  rude  classi- 
fication of  human  actions;  it  has  little  to  do  with  the 
external  at  all.  Neither  Macbeth  who  murders  his 
king  repels  us  nor  Rose  Bernd  who  murders  her  child. 
In  each  instance  the  dramatist  has  shown  us  the  divine 
humanity  that  transcends  error  and  crime.  When  an 
unrelieved  moral  ugliness  is  shown,  it  seems  necessary 
to  the  effects  of  tragedy  that  the  author  communicate 
his  sense  of  its  quality  to  us.  That  is  what  Bernstein 
so  signally  fails  to  do.  We  see  his  protagonist  writhe 
in  the  degradation  of  his  exorbitant  passions  and  never 
glimpse  a  world  beyond  the  fevered  delusions  in  which 
the  man  is  caught.  Thus  the  action  is  stained  with  a 
spiritual  sordidness  which  does  not  reside,  as  superficial 
critics  think,  in  poverty  or  dirt  or  meanness  of  occupa- 
tion and  station  or  in  anything  material  and  tangible, 
but  solely  in  the  absence  of  those  creative  overtones  by 


Pity  and  Terror  loi 

which  the  artist  persuades  us  of  the  integrity  and  tran- 
scendence of  his  own  vision  of  things. 

I  have  thought  it  more  useful  to  offer  briefly  these 
fundamental  considerations  than  to  criticize  either  A 
Bill  of  Divorcement  or  The  Claw  in  minuter  detail, 
or  to  explain  by  a  concrete  appeal  the  genuinely  tragic 
character  of  The  Children's  Tragedy,  and  of  Mr.  Arthur 
Richman's  Ambush.  What  Dryden  called  "the  grounds 
of  criticism  in  tragedy"  are  apt  to  meet  with  no  inquiry 
among  us.  The  fear  of  setting  up  rules  and  being 
didactic  is,  indeed,  the  beginning  of  wisdom.  But  to 
harbor  that  fear  is  not  to  abandon  the  reasonable  ques- 
tion: How  does  tragedy  achieve  its  effects?  And  the 
answer  is:  By  showing  us  human  ills  which  we  accept, 
upon  a  full  understanding  of  all  their  causes,  as  inher- 
ently irremediable  through  such  a  form  and  tone  as 
demonstrate  the  author's  transcendence  of  that  world 
of  illusion  which  he  delineates.  When  all  these  ele- 
ments are  present  our  pity  is  complete,  our  terror  is 
rooted  in  reason,  but  we  are  elated  and  not  depressed 
because  the  dramatist  has  taken  us  with  him  upon  that 
peak  of  vision  from  which  he  surveys  the  miseries  and 
the  errors  of  mankind. 


Susan  Glaspell 

I.    The  Early  Plays  ^ 

In  the  rude  little  auditorium  of  the  Provincetown 
Players  on  MacDougall  Street  there  is  an  iron  ring  in 
the  wall,  and  a  legend  informs  you  that  the  ring  was 
designed  for  the  tethering  of  Pegasus.  But  the  winged 
horse  has  never  been  seen.  An  occasional  play  might 
have  allured  him;  the  acting  of  it  would  invariably 
have  driven  him  to  indignant  flight.  For,  contrary  to 
what  one  would  expect,  the  acting  of  the  Players  has 
been  not  only  crude  and  unequal;  it  has  been  without 
energy,  without  freshness,  without  the  natural  stir  and 
eloquence  that  come  from  within.  This  is  the  circum- 
stance which  has  tended  to  obscure  the  notable  talent 
of  Susan  Glaspell.  The  Washington  Square  Players 
produced  Trifles  and  thus  gave  a  wide  repute  to  what 
is  by  no  means  her  best  work.  Bernice,  not  only  her 
masterpiece  but  one  of  the  indisputably  important 
dramas  of  the  modern  English  or  American  theatre, 
was  again  played  by  the  Provincetown  Players  with 
more  than  their  accustomed  feebleness  and  lack  of 
artistic  lucidity.  The  publication  of  Miss  GlaspelPs 
collected  plays  at  last  lifts  them  out  of  the  tawdriness 
^  Plays.    By  Susan  Glaspell. 

102 


Susan  G  las  pel  I  (103 

of  their  original  production  and  lets  them  live  by  their 
own  inherent  life. 

That  life  is  strong,  though  it  is  never  rich.  In 
truth,  it  is  thin.  Only  it  is  thin  not  like  a  wisp  of 
straw,  but  hke  a  tongue  of  flame.  Miss  Glaspell  is 
morbidly  frugal  in  expression,  but  nakedly  candid  in 
substance.  There  are  no  terrors  for  her  in  the  world 
of  thought;  she  thinks  her  way  clearly  and  hardily 
through  a  problem  and  always  thinks  in  strictly  dra- 
n^atic  terms.  But  her  form  and,  more  specifically,  her 
dialogue,  have  something  of  the  helplessness  and  the 
numb  pathos  of  the  "twisted  things  that  grow  in  un- 
favoring  places"  which  employ  her  imagination.  She 
is  a  dramatist,  but  a  dramatist  who  is  a  little  afraid  of 
speech.  Her  dialogue  is  so  spare  that  it  often  becomes 
arid;  at  times,  as  in  The  Outside,  her  attempt  to  lend 
a  stunted  utterance  to  her  silenced  creatures  makes  for 
a  hopeless  obscurity.  The  bleak  farmsteads  of  Iowa, 
the  stagnant  villages  of  New  England,  have  touched 
her  work  with  penury  and  chill.  She  wants  to  speak 
out  and  to  let  her  people  speak  out.  But  neither  she 
nor  they  can  conquer  a  sense  that  free  and  intimate 
and  vigorous  expression  is  a  little  shameless.  To  un- 
cover one's  soul  seems  almost  like  uncovering  one's 
body.  Behind  Miss  Glaspell's  hardihood  of  thought 
hover  the  fear  and  self-torment  of  the  Puritan.  She  is 
a  modern  radical  and  a  New  England  school  teacher; 
she  is  a  woman  of  intrepid  thought  and  also  the 


104  ^^^  American  Stage 

cramped  and  aproned  wife  on  some  Iowa  farm.  She 
is  a  composite,  and  that  composite  is  intensely  Ameri- 
can. She  is  never  quite  spontaneous  and  unconscious 
and  free,  never  the  unquestioning  servant  of  her  art. 
She  broods  and  tortures  herself  and  weighs  the  issues 
of  expression. 

If  this  view  of  Miss  Glaspell's  literary  character  is 
correct,  it  may  seem  strange  upon  superficial  considera- 
tion that  four  of  her  seven  one-act  plays  are  comedies. 
But  two  of  them,  the  rather  trivial  Suppressed  Desires 
and  the  quite  brilliant  Tickless  Time,  were  written  in 
collaboration  with  George  Cram  Cook,  a  far  less  scrupu- 
lous and  more  ungirdled  mind.  Her  comedy,  further- 
more, is  never  hearty.  It  is  not  the  comedy  of  char- 
acter but  of  ideas,  or,  rather,  of  the  confusion  or  false- 
ness or  absurdity  of  ideas.  Woman's  Honor  is  the  best 
example  of  her  art  in  this  mood.  By  a  sound  and 
strictly  dramatic  if  somewhat  too  geometrical  device, . 
Miss  Glaspell  dramatizes  a  very  searching  ironic  idea: 
a  man  who  refuses  to  establish  an  alibi  in  order  to  save 
a  woman's  honor  dies  to  prove  her  possessed  of  what 
he  himself  has  taken  and  risks  everything  to  demon- 
strate the  existence  of  what  has  ceased  to  be.  The  one- 
act  tragedies  are  more  characteristic  of  her;  they  cleave 
deep,  but  they  also  illustrate  what  one  might  almost 
call  her  taciturnity.  That  is  the  fault  of  her  best- 
known  piece,  Trifles.  The  theme  is  magnificent;  it  is 
inherently  and  intensely  dramatic,  since  its  very  nature 


Susan  Glaspell  [lo^ 

is  culmination  and  crisis.  But  the  actual  speech  of 
the  play  is  neither  sufficientk  nor  sufficiently  direct. 
Somewhere  in  every  dramai  words  must  ring  out.  They 
need  not  ring  like  trumpets.  The  ring  need  not  be 
loud,  but  it  must  be  clear.  Suppose  in  Trifles  you  do 
not,  on  the  stage,  catch  the  precise  significance  of  the 
glances  which  the  neighbor  women  exchange.  There 
need  have  been  no  set  speech,  no  false  eloquence,  no 
heightening  of  what  these  very  women  might  easily 
have  said  in  their  own  persons.  But  one  aches  for  a 
word  to  release  the  dumbness,  complete  the  crisis,  and 
drive  the  tragic  situation  home. 

The  same  criticism  may  be  made,  though  in  a  lesser 
degree,  of  Miss  Glaspell's  single  full-length  play,  Ber- 
nice.  No  production  would  be  just  to  the  very  high 
merits  of  that  piece  which  did  not  add  several  speeches 
to  the  first  and  third  acts  and  give  these  the  spiritual 
and  dramatic  clearness  which  the  second  already  has. 
Crude  people  will  call  the  play  "talky."  But  indeed 
there  is  not  quite  talk  enough.  Nor  does  Miss  Glaspell 
deal  here  with  simple  and  stifled  souls.  That  objec- 
tion is  the  only  one  to  be  made.  The  modern  American 
drama  has  nothing  better  to  show  than  Miss  Glaspell's 
portrait  of  the  "glib  and  empty"  writer  whose  skill  was 
"a  mask  for  his  lack  of  power"  and  whose  wife  sought, 
even  as  she  died,  to  lend  him  that  power  through  the 
sudden  impact  of  a  supremely  tragic  reality.  The  sur- 
face of  the  play  is  delicate  and  hushed.    But  beneath 


io6  The  American  Stage 

the  surface  is  the  intense  struggle  of  rending  forces. 
Bernice  is  dead.  The  soft  radiance  of  her  spirit  is  still 
upon  the  house.  It  is  still  reflected  in  her  father's  ways 
and  words.  Her  husband  and  her  friend  hasten  to 
that  house.  And  now  the  drama  sets  in,  the  drama  that 
grows  from  Bernice's  last  words  to  her  old  servant.  It 
is  a  dramatic  action  that  moves  and  stirs  and  trans- 
forms. There  is  hardly  the  waving  of  a  curtain  in  those 
quiet  rooms.  Yet  the  dying  woman's  words  are  seen 
to  have  been  a  creative  and  dramatic  act.  Through 
a  bright,  hard  window  one  watches  people  in  a  house 
of  mourning.  They  stand  or  sit  and  talk  haltingly  as 
people  do  at  such  times.  Nothing  is  done.  Yet  every- 
thing happens — death  and  life  and  a  new  birth.  What 
more  can  drama  give? 

II.    Inheritors 

While  managers  are  returning  from  early  spring 
trips  to  London  and  Paris  with  the  manuscripts  of 
plays  ranging  from  Shaw  to  Bataille,  our  native  drama 
is  gathering  an  ever  more  vigorous  life.  The  process 
has  few  observers.  But  all  great  things  have  had  their 
origin  in  obscurity  and  have  often  become  stained  and 
stunted  by  contact  with  the  world  and  its  success.  It 
need  matter  very  little  to  Susan  Glaspell  whether  her 
play  Inheritors,  which  the  Provincetown  Players  are 
producing,  ever  reaches  Broadway.  Nor  need  it  affect 
her  greatly  whether  the  criticism  of  the  hour  approves 


Susan  Glaspell  107 

it  or  not.  If  the  history  of  literature,  dramatic  or  non- 
dramatic,  teaches  us  anything,  it  is  that  Broadway  and 
its  reviewers  will  some  day  be  judged  by  their  attitude 
to  this  work. 

Inheritors  is  not,  in  all  likelihood,  a  great  play,  as  it 
is  certainly  not  a  perfect  one.  Neither  was  Haupt- 
mann's  Before  Dawn.  Like  the  latter  it  has  too  pointed 
an  intention;  unlike  the  latter  its  first  act  drifts  rather 
than  culminates  and  needs  both  tightening  and  abbre- 
viation. But  it  is  the  first  play  of  the  American  theatre 
in  which  a  strong  intellect  and  a  ripe  artistic  nature 
have  grasped  and  set  forth  in  human  terms  the  central 
tradition  and  most  burning  problem  of  our  national 
life  quite  justly  and  scrupulously,  equally  without  acri- 
mony or  compromise. 

In  1879  two  men  occupied  adjoining  farms  in  Iowa: 
Silas  Morton,  son  of  the  earliest  pioneers  from  Ohio 
who  fought  Black  Hawk  and  his  red  men  for  the  land, 
and  Felix  Fejevary,  a  Hungarian  gentleman,  who  has 
left  his  country  and  sought  freedom  in  America  after 
the  abortive  revolution  of  1848.  The  two  men  were 
lifelong  friends,  and  Morton,  who  had  had  but  two 
months  of  schooling,  absorbed  from  his  Hungarian 
friend  a  profound  sense  of  the  liberation  of  culture  and 
left  the  hill  which  ^e  white  man  had  wrung  by  force 
from  the  red  to  be  the  seat  of  a  college  that  was  to 
perpetuate  the  united  spirits  of  liberty  and  learning. 
In  the  second  act  we  are  taken  to  the  library  of  this 


io8  The  American  Stage 

college.  The  time  is  October,  1920.  Felix  Fejevary, 
2nd,  now  chairman  of  the  board  of  trustees,  is  in  con- 
sultation with  Senator  Lewis  of  the  finance  committee 
of  the  State  legislature.  Fejevary  wants  an  appropria- 
tion and  recalls  to  the  senator  that  the  college  has  been 
one  hundred  per  cent.  American  during  the  war  and 
that  the  students,  led  by  his  son,  have  even  acted  as 
strike-breakers  in  a  recent  labor  dispute.  The  son, 
Horace  Fejevary,  is  introduced,  a  youth  who  thinks 
Morton  College  is  getting  socially  shabby — too  many 
foreigners! — and  who  is  just  now  enraged  at  certain 
Hindu  students  who  have  plead  the  cause  of  the  In- 
dian revolutionists  and  quoted  Lincoln  in  defense  of 
their  position.  Senator  Lewis  thinks  the  lad  a  fine 
specimen.  But,  talking  of  appropriations,  there  is  a 
certain  Professor  Holden  who  does  not  think  that  the 
Hindus  ought  to  be  deported,  who  has  said  that  Amer- 
ica is  the  traditional  asylum  of  revolutionaries,  and 
who  seems  to  be  a  Bolshevik  in  other  ways.  Fejevary 
promises  to  take  care  of  Holden,  and  the  ensuing  scene 
between  these  two  with  its  searching  revelation  of  spir- 
itual processes,  its  bitter  suppressions,  its  implication 
of  an  evil  barter  in  values  not  made  with  hands  touches 
a  point  of  both  dramatic  truth  and  force  which  no  other 
American  playwright  has  yet  rivaled.  The  ironic  and 
tragic  catastrophe  is  brought  about  by  another  member 
of  the  third  generation,  Madeline  Fejevary  Morton. 
To  her  mind,  natural  and  girlish  though  it  is,  the  mon- 


Susan  Glaspell  'I09 

strous  inner  contradictions  of  the  situation  are  not 
wholly  dark.  It  is  two  years  after  the  armistice.  Yet 
a  boy  chum  of  hers,  a  conscientious  objector,  is  still  in 
a  narrow  and  noisome  cell;  the  Hindu  students  who 
are  to  be  sent  to  certain  destruction  are  but  following 
the  precepts  of  Lincoln's  second  inaugural.  She  inter- 
feres in  their  behalf  and  proclaims  in  public,  crudely 
but  with  the  passionate  emphasis  of  youth,  the  prin- 
ciples for  which  her  two  grandfathers  founded  Morton 
College.  Her  offense,  under  the  Espionage  Act,  is  no 
laughing  matter.  People  with  foreign  names  have  got 
twenty  years  for  less.  Her  uncle  and  her  aunt  plead 
with  her;  Holden  asks  her  to  let  herself  ripen  for 
greater  uses;  her  father's  state  pleads  for  itself.  Miss 
Glaspell  has  been  careful  to  make  her  neither  priggish 
nor  tempestuous.  Some  inner  purity  of  soul  alone 
prompts  her  to  resist.  Suddenly  an  outcast,  she  goes 
forth  to  face  her  judges  and  suffer  her  martyrdom. 

No  competent  critic,  whatever  his  attitude  to  the 
play's  tendency,  will  be  able  to  deny  the  power  and 
brilliancy  of  Miss  Glaspell's  characterization.  The  de- 
lineation of  the  three  Fejevarys — father,  son  and 
grandson — is  masterly.  Through  the  figures  of  these 
men  she  has  recorded  the  tragic  disintegration  of  Amer- 
ican idealism.  The  second  Felix  remembers  his  father 
and  his  inheritance.  But  he  has  faced  the  seeming 
facts  so  long  and  compromised  so  much  that  he  is 
drained  dry  of  all  conviction  and  sincerity.    His  son  is 


'no  The  American  Stage 

an  empty  young  snob  and  ruffian.  With  equal  delicacy 
and  penetration  we  are  shown  the  three  Morton  gen- 
erations— the  slow,  magnificent  old  pioneer,  his  broken 
son,  his  granddaughter  Madeline  whose  sane  yet  fiery 
heart  symbolizes  the  hope  and  the  reliance  of  the 
future.  Alone  and  pathetic  among  them  all  stands 
Holden,  the  academic  wage  slave  who  knows  the  truth 
but  who  has  an  ailing  wife;  who  yearns  to  speak  but 
who  has  no  money  laid  by;  a  quiet  man  and  a  terrible 
judgment  on  the  civilization  that  has  shaped  him. 

In  the  second  and  third  acts  Miss  Glaspell's  dialogue 
expresses  with  unfailing  fitness  her  sensitive  knowledge 
of  her  characters.  It  has  entire  verisimilitude.  But  it 
has  constant  ironic  and  symbolic  suppressions  and  cor- 
respondences and  overtones.  This  power  of  creating 
human  speech  which  shall  be  at  once  concrete  and  sig- 
nificant, convincing  in  detail  and  spiritually  cumulative 
in  progression,  is,  of  course,  the  essential  gift  of  the 
authentic  dramatist.  That  gift  Miss  Glaspell  always 
possessed  in  a  measure;  she  has  now  brought  it  to  a 
rich  and  effective  maturity. 


An  Evening  at  the  Movies 

To  criticize  the  movies  may  seem  to  have  fallen  low 
indeed.  But  Mr.  D.  W.  Griffith,  superman  of  the  "pho- 
toplay," invites  you  with  a  gesture  of  quite  regal  cour- 
tesy. "Here,"  he  seems  to  say,  "is  a  thing  that  has 
little  in  common  with  your  quarter  show  around  the 
comer;  here  is,  if  anywhere,  the  unheard  of  and  in- 
comparable." You  go  and  find  yourself  in  the  midst 
of  a  sufficiently  intense  experience  of  life,  if  not  of  art. 
All  that  depresses  and  discourages  you  in  certain  char- 
acteristic moods  of  your  countrymen  is  here:  the  moral 
littleness  and  the  physical  magnificence,  the  intellectual 
sloth  and  the  mechanical  speed.  The  contrast  that 
meets  you  is  not  the  ancient  and  tragic  one  between 
grandeur  and  mortality;  it  is  a  quaint  and  new  one 
between  grandeur  and  silliness.  But  do  not  fancy  Mr. 
Griffith  a  Barnum,  a  knowing  fakir  on  an  heroic  scale. 
He  creates  or  rather  assembles  his  spectacles  within 
the  mood  to  which  they  are  to  appeal;  he  himself  throbs 
and  yells  and  hisses  the  villain  with  that  vast  audience 
which  is  stirred  and  shaken  by  these  racing  pictures  as 
it  could  never  be  by  the  passion  of  Medea  or  the  pit- 
eousness  of  Lear. 
He  has  taken  the  tawdry  old  fable  of  Way  Down 

III 


112  The  American  Stage 

East — the  betrayal,  the  mock  marriage,  the  villain's 
downfall,  the  happy  ending — and  left  it,  in  all  essen- 
tials, precisely  what  it  was.  The  written  legends  on  the 
screen  that  interpret  the  action  in  a  style  of  inimitably 
stale  sugariness  serve  but  to  intensify  the  coarse  and 
blundering  insufficiency  of  the  moral  involved.  These 
hectic  appeals  to  the  mob  in  favor  of  conventions  as 
stiff  as  granite  and  as  merciless  as  gangrene  are  pow- 
erfully calculated  to  tighten  thongs  that  even  now  often 
cut  to  the  very  heart  and  to  increase  the  already  dread- 
ful sum  of  social  intolerance  and  festering  pain.  For 
in  the  applause  of  these  audiences  there  is  not  only 
satisfaction;  there  is  menace.  Ten  thousand  people, 
an  hundred  thousand  people,  will,  sooner  or  later,  leave 
a  theatre  after  this  picture  and  go  out  into  the  world 
determined  to  make  the  ideals  of  Mr.  Griffith  prevail. 
Woe  to  a  neighbor,  a  friend,  a  kinsman  who  shall  choose 
to  lead  his  life  upon  another  plan !  Against  this  prop- 
aganda poets  and  philosophers  are  as  powerless  as  a 
child  trying  to  batter  down  a  door  of  oak. 

They  are  the  more  powerless  because  the  manager 
with  a  craftiness  that,  on  this  scale,  has  in  it  some- 
thing grandiose,  drives  home  his  moral  by  the  sharpest, 
the  most  intimate,  the  most  unashamed  appeals.  A 
son  dances  a  simple  old  country  dance  with  his  mother 
and,  with  a  grave  and  tender  courtesy,  kisses  her  faded 
cheek.  Dusk  falls  over  two  young  lovers  in  an  orchard. 
Apple  blossoms  sway  in  the  breeze.    Behind  the  screen 


An  Evening  at  the  Movies  113 

well-modulated  choral  voices  sing  an  old-fashioned 
ditty  that  brings  back  to  every  American  those  scenes 
of  his  earlier  years  from  which  no  man  can  withhold 
a  faint  tenderness.  Our  youth  does  tug  at  our  hearts. 
If  the  steady  and  disciplined  mind  recognizes,  however 
austerely,  the  natural  power  of  such  things,  consider 
how  those  unschooled  characters  go  down  before  so 
vividly  real  and  beautiful  a  presentation  of  them.  They 
are  ensnared  by  what  is  not  the  worst  within  them, 
and  driven  forth  by  their  very  pieties  to  persecute  and 
to  traduce  their  fellowmen.  Who  is  so  base  that,  hav- 
ing seen  this  picture,  he  will  not  battle  for  the  security, 
the  permanence,  the  sanctity  of — well,  of  ever3rthing 
exactly  as  it  is? 

Mr.  Griffith's  "elaboration"  of  the  story  is  purely 
scenic  in  kind.  Not  to  praise  his  work  in  this  respect 
would  be  an  empty  affectation.  Life  is  here  in  great 
beauty  and  in  great  abundance.  The  gorgeous  ball  in 
the  prologue,  the  barn-dance,  the  farm-yards,  the  sleigh- 
rides  are  all  excellent.  The  directing  especially  in  the 
barn-dance  scene  is  superb.  No  stage  manager  has 
ever  created  a  fuller  sense  of  the  authentic  rhythm  and 
thrill  and  abandon  of  reality.  All  the  group  scenes,  in- 
deed, are  magnificently  done.  There  is  in  them  a  union 
of  strength  and  elasticity  that  required  both  insight  and 
imagination  to  produce.  Wherever  no  moral  ideas  in- 
trude, wherever  neither  straight  thinking  nor  clean  feel- 
ing was  to  be  done,  wherever  the  scene  has  no  signifi- 


1 14  The  American  Stage 

cance  beyond  its  physical  aspect  and  movement,  Mr. 
Griffith  and  his  actors  have  both  grace  and  power.  It 
follows  that  the  picture  reaches  its  highest  point  where 
nature  and  naked  physical  danger  are  to  be  shown. 
When  the  heroine's  past  is  discovered,  the  squire  drives 
her — like  Hazel  Kirke — out  into  the  storm  and  the 
night.  The  scene  is  excessively  silly  and  mawkish. 
But  he  does  not  drive  her  out,  remember,  into  a  storm 
of  paper  from  the  wings.  It  is  an  authentic  blizzard 
in  the  forests  of  Vermont.  The  girl  flees  to  the  frozen 
Connecticut  river.  But  the  ice  cracks  and  is  riven  and, 
l5ang  on  a  floe,  she  is  driven  toward  the  thundering 
falls.  The  hero  follows  her  and  saves  her  at  the  last 
moment.  A  shabby  old  trick!  But  the  feigning  is  re- 
duced to  a  minimum.  A  large  engineering  staff  worked 
for  two  months  to  force  nature  itself  to  enact  this  scene. 
The  whirling  storm,  the  icy  water,  the  racing  floes  are 
actually  there.    It  is  not  art,  but  it  is  magnificent. 

Anthropologists  tell  us  that  in  primitive  society  the 
violator  of  a  taboo  is  the  central  object  of  vengeance. 
Yet  when  trained  observers  question  members  of  the 
tribe  as  to  the  reason  for  any  particular  taboo,  primi- 
tive man  cannot  even  comprehend  the  nature  of  that 
question.  His  whole  concern  is  with  the  how,  never 
with  the  why  of  his  tribal  customs.  In  the  foreground 
of  his  consciousness  is  always  the  will,  never  the  reason. 
In  the  face  of  nature  he  is  agile,  skilful,  and  intrepid; 
before  the  uses  of  his  tribe  or  phratry  he  is  a  shivering 


An  Evening  at  the  Movies  115 

and  unthinking  slave.  The  parallel  is,  at  least,  instruc- 
tive. Mr.  Griffith  and  his  kind  harness  rivers  and  play 
with  storms  in  order  to  tell  the  tribe  what  it  already 
most  potently  believes,  and  to  fortify  its  already  over- 
active and  perilously  blind  volitions.  In  this  vicarious 
affirmation  of  its  will  the  audience  feels  something  that 
approaches  ecstasy,  as  it  also  does  in  witnessing  the 
contest  between  men  and  the  primordial  forces  of  the 
earth. 

There  are  secondary  sources  of  pleasure.  Miss  Gish 
is  an  extremely  gifted  young  woman.  The  art  of  repro- 
ducing the  exact  gesture  and  facial  expression  of  life 
could  not  well  go  further.  She  was  present  in  a  box  on 
this  first  showing  of  the  picture  and  received  a  deserved 
ovation.  Yet  were  she  to  act  the  part  of  Nora  Helmer, 
as  she  so  exquisitely  could,  these  audiences  would  turn 
from  her  in  hot  and  angry  contempt.  Her  art,  as  such, 
is  nothing  to  them.  They  only  know  that  she  violated 
no  taboo. 


The  One-Act  Play  in  America 

In  the  stricter  technical  sense  the  one-act  play,  like 
the  short  story,  is  a  modern  invention.  And  even  more 
than  the  short  story  do  its  restrictions  demand  a  very 
high  concentration  of  material  and  an  economy  of 
means  so  strict  that  its  besetting  danger  is  a  spurious 
and  loud  effectiveness.  But  since  precisely  such  ef- 
fectiveness appeals  strongly  to  the  nerves  of  the  aver- 
age audience,  the  most  successful  one-act  plays,  those 
of  Sudermann  or  of  Alfred  Sutro,  have  not  always  been 
the  best  of  their  kind.  Strindberg's  eerie  acuteness  of 
vision  and  Schnitzler's  beautiful  awareness  of  the  dra- 
matic life  in  hushed  and  muffled  things  have  made  the 
one-act  plays  of  these  two  the  best  in  the  world.  Such 
S5mibolical  projections  of  a  poet's  highly  personal  sense 
of  awe  and  mystery  and  spiritual  values  as  Maeter- 
linck's Interieur  or  Hofmannsthal's  Der  Tor  und  der 
Tod  are  l5n-ical  in  method,  though  dramatic  in  form, 
and  hardly  enter  the  question  of  the  one-act  play  in  the 
broader  life  of  the  theatre.  There  are  isolated  master- 
pieces such  as  Synge's  Riders  to  the  Sea.  Generally 
speaking,  however,  the  contemporary  one-act  play  will 
conform  to  one  of  the  three  types:  the  artificial,  the 
psychological,  the  symbolist. 

ii6 


The  One-Act  Play  in  America         117 

The  narrow  means  and  tentative  beginnings  of  the 
experimental  stages  in  America  have  made  the  one-act 
play  important  in  the  recent  history  of  our  theatre. 
Nowhere  else  has  it  held  a  quite  comparable  place.  On 
the  Continent  cycles  of  one-act  plays  by  a  distinguished 
dramatist  are  presented  whenever  one  has  chosen  that 
form  of  expression.  Among  us  there  has  been  a  cult 
of  the  one-act  play  as  such.  In  the  hands  of  the  Wash- 
ington Square  players  this  cult  reached  its  highest  point. 
To-day,  though  it  still  persists,  it  is  less  intense.  Our 
insurgent  theatre  is  entering  upon  a  robuster  phase  of 
its  life.  A  bill  of  one-act  plays  by  different  authors, 
chosen  partly  to  harmonize  and  partly  to  contrast,  is 
after  all  a  source  of  somewhat  frail  and  artificial  pleas- 
ure. The  audiences,  at  all  events,  have  commonly  been 
a  trifle  self-conscious  and  have  worn  their  sophistica- 
tion with  more  pride  than  grace. 

During  the  past  ten  years,  however,  the  production 
of  one-act  plays  in  this  country  has  been  very  large.  It 
is  a  pity  that  one  cannot  also  call  it  rich.  But  it  did 
not  need  Miss  Mayorga's  extremely  useful  though  some- 
what fantastically  edited  volume^  to  tell  us  that  rich 
is  the  one  word  with  which  to  sum  up  all  the  qualities 
that  the  movement  lacked.  It  was  a  movement  which 
every  one  who  cared  for  the  theatre  supported  and  still 
supports.     But  if  his  sanity  was  quite  firm,  or  if  he 

1  Representative  One  Act  Plays  by  American  Authors.  Selected 
by  Margaret  Gardner  Mayorga. 


ii8  The  American  Stage 

was  in  close  touch  with  other  things  in  the  modern 
drama,  he  could  never  lose  a  sense  of  being  in  an  artis- 
tic atmosphere  that  was  supposed  to  be  keen  but  was 
only  thin.  It  was  astir  with  a  bustle  of  aspiration.  But 
the  gusts  were  quick  and  a  bit  too  explosive  and  died 
down  in  a  little  mist  of  staleness.  The  figure  halts. 
And  one  is  indeed  embarrassed,  in  any  critical  descrip- 
tion of  these  plays,  by  one's  cordial  sense  of  the  talents 
and  ambitions  of  certain  immediate  contemporaries  and 
by  one's  clear  vision  of  the  lack  that  unites  them  all. 
Realists  or  romantics,  sociological  or  poetic  playwrights, 
they  are  all  deficient  in  vitality,  strength  and  sap.  The 
formula  according  to  which  all  but  three  of  the  twenty- 
five  plays  in  Miss  Mayorga's  volume  seem  to  have  been 
written  is  this:  The  one-act  play  is  an  admirable  vehicle 
for  advanced  thought  or  delicate  fancy  or  dramatic 
episode.  Let  us  seek  such  a  thought,  fancy,  or  incident, 
use  the  approved  methods,  and  offer  the  result  to  a 
little  theatre.  Nowhere  is  there  a  sense  of  that  impas- 
sioned fusion  of  impulse  and  form  which  alone  makes 
art;  nowhere  any  evidence  of  the  fire  and  compulsion 
of  an  inner  experience.  The  exceptions  are  painfully 
few;  two  or  three  things  by  Eugene  O'Neil,  Theodore 
Dreiser's  The  Girl  in  the  Coffin,  Bosworth  Crocker's 
The  Last  Straw.  These  few  are  tragic  and  dramatic 
not  only  in  gesture  but  in  feeling;  they  were  not  writ- 
ten to  be  played  but  played  because  they  had  been 
written. 


The  One- Act  Play  in  America        (119 

The  symbolical  plays  are  the  most  bloodless.  They 
are  either  obviously  and  woodenly  made,  like  Mr.  Percy 
MacKaye's  Sain  Average,  or  ineffectually  and  con- 
ventionally idealistic  like  Miss  Hortense  Flexner's 
Voices  or  Miss  Alice  Gerstenberg's  Beyond.  The 
ideals  are  too  correct,  the  sentiments  too  acceptable. 
Here  is  the  central  weakness.  What  these  pieces 
lack  is  not  skill  or  adroitness  or  good  intentions, 
There  is  no  free  and  self-sustaining  personality  be- 
hind them.  The  young  Maeterlinck,  Hofmannsthal, 
and  Yeats  had  a  vision  unseen  but  by  them,  incom- 
mimicable  except  through  their  words.  They  had 
no  philosophical  notions  in  particular,  no  ideals  for 
practice,  no  saws  for  conduct.  But  they  had  a  personal 
vision  of  the  mystery  of  life  which  burned  away  all 
other  vision,  darkened  for  the  hour  all  other  light, 
opened  new  vistas  into  the  land  of  the  soul.  Without 
that  there  is  no  art,  no  literature,  no  drama.  The  day 
of  the  folk-singer  is  over.  Nothing  can  justify  the 
creative  act  to-day,  as  Gourmont  eloquently  pointed  out, 
but  personal  vision.  And  that  requires  character,  not 
in  the  current  sense  of  technical  blamelessness  or  an 
assent  to  common  standards,  but  in  the  higher  sense 
of  daring  to  experience  in  order  to  transmute  experi- 
ence into  ripeness,  wisdom,  beauty.  The  moral,  for 
there  is  one,  is  this:  Our  young  writers  have  been  too 
much  concerned  with  technique  and  too  little  concerned 
with  their  minds.    The  wide  dissemination  of  techni- 


I20  The  American  Stage 

cal  instruction  has  persuaded  persons  to  write  plays 
whose  inner  equipment  sufficed  for  a  family  letter. 
The  published  plays  of  the  Harvard  Workshop  display 
the  same  emptiness  and  technical  dexterity  as  the 
greater  number  of  Miss  Mayorga's  exhibits.  And  here 
again  the  kinship  of  the  one-act  play  with  the  short 
story  is  plain.  Its  composition  has  been  taught.  If  it 
were  more  profitable,  courses  would  soon  appear  in  the 
curriculums  of  the  correspondence  schools.  But  the 
patter  about  learning  one's  craft  does  not  apply  to  lit- 
erature. What  truly  destined  "maker"  was  ever 
silenced  for  lack  of  craftsmanship?  True  matter  cre- 
ates form.  The  only  discipline  the  writer  needs  is 
self-discipline.  His  impulse  must  be  Hke  love  or 
prayer.  It  is  resistless  or  it  is  nothing.  But  how  many 
of  these  contemporary  one-act  plays  could  have  been 
left  unwritten  without  causing  their  authors  a  mo- 
ment's discomfort?  That  question  both  judges  them 
and  points  the  way. 


(The  Lonely  Classics 

I.    Medea . 

No  one  should  fail  to  see  the  Medea  of  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Maurice  Browne.  The  play  reaches  you  with  unex- 
pected intensity  and  force.  You  forget  that  it  is  ven- 
erable. The  passion  of  it  pounds  like  the  sea  on  rocks. 
Gone  are  the  two  thousand  three  hundred  and  fifty-one 
years  since  the  drama's  first  performance  at  Athens. 
You  find  yourself  face  to  face  with  Euripides,  the  ear- 
liest master  of  the  problem  play,  the  discoverer  of  the 
great  psychological  dilemmas  of  mankind,  the  father 
of  a  mighty  progeny.  That  being  so,  one's  little  quar- 
rels with  Mr,  Maurice  Browne's  production  do  not 
greatly  matter.  What  one  missed  was  spaciousness 
and  simplicity  of  effect.  The  lighting  devices  are  too 
clever.  Yet  at  the  crucial  moment  they  fail  and  the 
sun-chariot  is  paltry.  It  was  inevitable,  of  course,  that 
the  version  of  Gilbert  Murray  should  be  used,  and 
hence  the  choruses — admirably  chanted  and  spoken — 
often  sweep  away  the  Euripidean  passion  and  philos- 
ophy and  transport  one  to  Swinburne's  Forsaken  Gar- 
den by  the  brink  of  his  mother,  the  sea.  But  Miss 
Ellen  Van  Volkenburg  acts  with  as  compact  and  un- 

121 


122  The  American  Stage 

swerving  an  inner  conviction  as  if  she  were  indeed  the 
first  prophetic  proclaimer  of  the  wrongs  of  her  sex. 

For  such  Medea  is.  When  she  has  said  that  she 
would  rather  thrice  maintain  herself  in  an  embattled 
field  than  bear  once  the  pangs  of  childbirth  she  has 
opened  the  great  feminist  case  and  destroyed  the  legend 
of  the  sheltered  woman.  She  also  states  with  a  hard 
and  final  clearness  the  injustice  of  woman's  social  de- 
pendence on  her  husband  and  stamps  divorce  as  useless 
so  long  as  the  practice  involves  a  reproach.  Under  the 
pressure  of  wrongs  that  are  indeed  intolerable  she  lends 
a  voice  to  the  unhappy  race  of  woman.  With  her  own 
hands  she  once  slew  her  brother  for  Jason's  sake;  for 
him  she  gave  up  home  and  friends  and  memories;  she 
bore  him  two  men  children.  And  now  he  would  wed 
the  young  daughter  of  Creon — perhaps  from  ambition, 
perhaps  from  desire — and  make  Medea,  to  use  the 
naked  bitterness  of  her  own  words,  "a  thing  mocked 
at."  Why  should  she  not  be  implacable?  Even  if  to- 
day we  must  dismiss  the  murder  of  her  children  from 
the  world  of  fact,  we  are  still  shaken  by  her  passion, 
which  even  at  its  extreme  is  scarcely  more  cruel  than 
her  wrongs. 

No  wonder  that  Jason,  accomplished  sophist  though 
he  be,  shrinks  and  withers  beneath  her  scorn.  Nor  is 
it  surprising  that  from  a  contemporary  American  per- 
formance he  emerges  as  morally  loathsome.  We  may 
deprecate  the  ferocity  of  Medea's  deeds;  we  approve 


The  Lonely  Classics  123 

that  of  her  passion.  But  Euripides,  whom  none  can 
accuse  of  a  lack  of  justice  to  her,  has  not  left  Jason 
wholly  without  extenuation  or  defense.  He  lets  the 
man  make  three  points.  It  was  love,  it  was  an  ele- 
mental infatuation,  that  caused  Medea  to  slay  Absyrtes 
and  Pelias  for  his  sake.  For  the  deeds  done  under  the 
sting  of  so  selfish  a  passion  Medea  deserves  no  reward. 
His  guilt  lay,  of  course,  in  accepting  the  benefit  of  her 
crimes.  His  second  point  is  that  no  Grecian,  that  is, 
no  civilized  woman,  would  have  been  capable  of  them 
and  that  hence  the  Colchian  murderess  and  sorceress — 
whatever  her  wrongs — is  but  continuing  her  ghastly 
career.  His  third  point  is  that  Medea  exaggerates 
those  wrongs  monstrously  because,  like  all  women,  she 
identifies  the  life  of  sex  with  life's  totality.  If  their 
marriage  is  blest  they  want  for  nothing  else;  if  it  is 
unblest  they  become  furies  and  lose  all  sense  of  human 
values. 

Euripides  dwells  on  the  barbaric  character  of  the 
Colchian  princess.  Yet  through  the  words  of  Jason  he 
generalizes  from  her  and,  ardent  feminist  though  he  is, 
shows  his  knowledge  of  woman's  fatal  nearness  to  the 
elemental  and  primitive.  Jason  balances  many  things 
in  his  mind;  Medea  does  not.  In  their  last  terrible 
interview  he  reflects  and  remembers  and  regrets.  She 
scorns  to  answer  and  appeals  to  Zeus.  Over  the  very 
bodies  of  her  murdered  boys  no  doubt  afflicts  her.  Her 
revenge  is  for  her  as  absolute  in  quality  as  was  her 


124  ^^^  American  Stage 

wrong.  She  sees  nothing  above  or  beyond  her  sense  of 
outrage  and  promptly  identifies  it  with  the  outraged 
justice  of  God.  Therefore  the  score  is  rightly  evened 
and  a  final  satisfaction  is  hers:  "I  love  my  pains  so 
that  thou  laugh  no  more!" 

One  wonders  whether  Euripides  saw  in  his  imagina- 
tion the  latter  years  of  this  tragic  pair.  Medea  went  to 
the  land  of  Erectheus.  There  she  ordained  festivals 
and  rites  to  make  due  atonement  for  the  guilt  of  having 
slain  her  children.  Since  she  believed  such  atonement 
possible,  nothing  ever  shook  her  conviction  that  she 
was  the  purely  tragic  victim  of  a  wicked  man  on  whom 
she  had  avenged  not  her  wrongs  only  but  those  of 
womankind.  She  cultivated  an  air  of  grandeur  and  of 
noble  melancholy.  She  became  a  privileged  character 
at  the  court  of  -^geus  and  nursed  a  tragic  and  self- 
righteous  pride.  Jason  had  no  such  inner  comforts. 
He  was  quite  broken.  But  an  inner  break  brings 
thought  and  wandering  meditation.  The  sophist  had 
already  begun  to  pass  from  the  mere  acts  of  persuasion 
to  deeper  reasoning  concerning  the  true  character  of 
men  and  women  and  of  their  harsh  contentions.  In 
the  dust  of  a  roadside  he  became,  perhaps,  more  ac- 
ceptable to  the  understanding  gods  than  Medea  at  the 
court  of  a  king. 

Is  it  to  consider  too  curiously  to  consider  so?  As- 
suredly there  are  hints  in  the  text  of  the  play  that 
Euripides  was  not  unaware  of  what  it  must  have  been 


THe  Lonely  Classics  125 

to  be  married  to  Medea.  She  had  made  terrific  sacri- 
fices and  she  was  fiercely  faithful.  But  past  sacrifices 
do  not  fill  to-day  with  pleasantness  or  make  it  easier 
to  live.  Medea,  like  many  women,  was  acutely  con- 
scious of  them.  They  made  her  stern,  superior,  and 
exacting.  Fidelity,  given  and  received  as  a  matter  of 
course,  is  beautiful.  But  it  is  a  tender  and  a  delicate 
thing.  Emphasized  and  psychically  exploited  it  may 
become  first  a  burden  and  then  a  nuisance.  Imagine, 
to  descend  to  the  plain  bread  of  life,  a  woman  who 
plays  noble  variations  on  this  theme:  You  must  not 
cross  me  because  I  once  slew  men  for  your  sake,  and 
your  slightest  thought  must  be  mine  because  mine  is 
yours!  Jason  dares  not  tell  her  the  truth.  But  the 
reasons  he  pleads  for  his  new  marriage  are  hollow  and 
specious.  His  insincerity  is  evident.  What  he  wanted 
was  brightness  and  naiVeness  and  a  wife  who  did  not 
bring  a  moral  menace  and  austere  compulsions  to  his 
bed  and  board.  Only  when  Medea  is  in  her  unap- 
proachable chariot  does  he  tell  her  that  real  opinion 
of  her  character  and  her  past  which  sent  him  wooing 
to  King  Creon's  house.  Is  that  ignoble  as  an  interpre- 
tation? Then  so  is  life  ignoble.  It  shows  the  depths 
within  depths  of  the  great  Attic  poet.  It  points  the 
way,  perhaps,  to  another  tragedy  on  the  immortal 
legend,  to  A  Modern  Medea, 


[126  The  American  Stage 

II.    A  Human  Hamlet 

Four  fluted  columns  of  olive-tinged  gray  with  invis- 
ible capitals  stretch  in  a  semi-circle  across  the  stage. 
About  these  the  dun  draperies  change  and  melt  gently 
into  shape  after  shape,  marking  the  rooms  and  halls 
and  galleries  of  Elsinore.  The  abundant  beauty  of 
shifting  color  is  furnished  wholly  by  the  costumes  of 
the  players.  The  columns  remain  even  in  the  church- 
yard scene  when  between  the  two  central  ones  there 
opens  a  vista  of  tumbled  headstones,  of  an  immemo- 
rial Celtic  cross,  and  of  two  solemn  poplars  against  a 
pallid  sky.  This  whole  imaginary  world  has  a  beauty 
that  is  full  of  sadness,  a  sadness  almost  eerie  with  the 
presage  of  imminent  decay.  It  is  shown  us  in  the  guise 
it  must  have  assumed  to  Hamlet's  vision.  For  his 
home  had  always  been  a  prison  to  him,  though  like 
many  prisons  it  was  not  without  tender  memories.  But 
the  scene  of  those  memories  had  been  darkened  by 
haunting  shapes  and  in  the  corridors  of  the  castle  there 
sounded  the  dull  echo  of  the  tread  of  doom. 

The  Hamlet  of  Mr.  E.  H.  Sothern's  impersonation 
who  moves  amid  these  scenes  has  achieved  a  final  es- 
cape from  the  remoteness  and  confusion  into  which  the 
problem-mongers  had  driven  him.  He  is  free  at  last  of 
all  false  eloquence,  all  posturing,  all  undue  conscious- 
ness of  self.  He  is  a  young  poet,  probably  a  minor 
poet  with  more  temperament  than  power.    His  posi- 


The  Lonely  Classics  127 

tion  and  the  feebleness  of  his  impulse  have  kept  him 
from  a  complete  dedication  to  his  studies  and  his  art; 
but  his  culture  is  fine  and  a  trifle  sophisticated  and  even 
at  thirty  he  prides  himself  a  little  upon  his  superiority 
to  the  rude  and  physical  manners  of  the  Danish  court. 
He  had  always  been  lonely  there.  He  admired  and 
loved  his  father.  But  he  idealized  him  too  completely 
ever  to  have  known  him  well.  The  queen  was  not 
without  the  natural  instincts  of  a  mother,  but  she  was 
restless,  passionate,  and  perverse.  So  the  little  lad  had 
played  with  the  court  jester  in  the  melancholy  castle 
gardens.  But  the  jester  soon  died  and  Hamlet  did  not 
find  friends  until  many  years  had  passed.  Then  he 
clung  to  Horatio  and  perhaps  to  one  or  two  others 
with  all  the  peculiar  tenderness  of  a  romantic  and  soli- 
tary soul.  He  became  a  scholar,  a  wit,  and  something 
of  a  poet.  His  intellectual  faculties  grew  sharp  and  , 
mature.  But  his  heart  remained  the  sensitive  and  as- 
tonished heart  of  a  child.  He  loved  Ophelia  with  a 
frank  tenderness  unschooled  by  wisdom  or  experience. 
His  cynicism,  after  the  manner  of  intellectual  youth, 
was  all  verbal  and  at  second  hand.  In  his  innermost 
soul  he  held  the  world,  at  least  his  world,  to  be  as  gen- 
tle, as  humane,  as  proud,  as  pure  as  himself. 

Then  his  world  crumbled.  His  father  died.  His 
mother's  marriage  wounded  his  delicacy  to  the  quick. 
His  first  impulse  was  to  take  refuge  in  the  studious 
cloisters  of  Wittenberg.   But  his  fate  was  upon  him  and 


12B  The  American  Stage 

there  is  a  forlorn  pathos  in  Mr.  Sothern's  quiet  rendi- 
tion of  the  line: 

"Indeed,  indeed,  sirs,  but  this  troubles  me." 

The  full  horrors  sweep  down  upon  him.  But  Hamlet 
cannot  at  once  grasp  and  deal  with  the  enormity  of  a 
world  so  changed  and  ruined.  The  habit  of  long  years 
drives  him  into  the  refuge  of  reticence  and  silence, 
and  the  naturalness  of  the  impulse  which  bade  him  sud- 
denly exclude  Marcellus  and  even  Horatio  from  his 
confidence  is  beautifully  interpreted  by  Mr.  Sothern 
as  arising  from  the  inherent  necessities  of  his  nature. 
He  determines  to  feign  madness,  which  is  but  another 
escape  for  a  sensitive  soul  intolerably  wrought  upon. 
Yet  the  feigning  is  only  for  moments.  Even  in  those 
moments,  as  during  the  scene  with  Polonius,  it  is 
tinged  by  his  old  irony.  He  cannot  help  dropping  the 
mask  even  before  Rosencranz  and  Guildenstern.  And 
in  the  great  scenes  with  Ophelia  and  his  mother  his 
cry  is  that  of  the  stricken  idealist  who  will  not  endure 
love  in  a  world  where  it  can  lend  itself  to  such  uses, 
nor  touch  a  mother's  hand  that  has  been  so  unspeak- 
ably defiled.  That  is  his  tragedy,  the  tragedy  of  a 
pure  soul  whose  moral  world  has  been  riven  beyond 
mending.  He  cannot  set  it  right.  Traditions  and  the 
natural  passions  counsel  revenge.  But  what  will  re- 
venge avail?  He  falls  into  the  profound  disillusion  of 
his  utterances  in  the  churchyard — old  truths  that  have 


The  Lonely  Classics  129 

come  home  to  him  and  that  are  so  at  variance  with  his 
great  praise  of  man — and  into  the  recklessness  of  his 
own  safety  that  ends  his  troubled  and  irreparably 
broken  life. 

Such  is  the  character  and  such  the  story  which  Mr. 
Sothern  projects  upon  the  stage.  He  has  lost  all  con- 
sciousness of  his  audience  and  all  consciousness  of 
himself  as  in  the  act  of  playing  a  part  so  famous  and 
difficult.  His  Hamlet  has  a  virile  intellect  and  a  subtle 
one,  but  a  nature  that  is  all  gentleness,  courtesy,  kind- 
ness, and  truth.  Above  all,  he  is  simple  at  heart.  The 
monologues  as  Mr.  Sothern  renders  them  lose  their 
last  tinge  of  rhetoric.  They  are  impassioned  or  re- 
flective self-communings,  broken  by  the  natural  pauses 
and  gestures  of  a  man  who  is  alone  with  his  own  soul. 
In  the  more  intellectual  and  colloquial  passages,  such 
as  the  prose  scene  with  the  players,  Mr.  Sothern  speaks 
as  a  man  among  men.  Here  Hamlet  was  bent  upon  his 
proper  business.  But  it  is  the  same  Hamlet,  though 
driven  into  a  world  of  thought  and  action  so  alien  and 
abhorrent,  who  uses  the  subtlety  of  his  mind  to  con- 
found the  courtiers  and  who  becomes  his  mother's 
accuser  and  her  reluctant  judge.  It  is  in  these  transi- 
tions from  mood  to  mood  that  Mr.  Sothern  employs  all 
the  delicacy  and  ripeness  of  his  art.  Beneath  the  irony, 
the  wit,  the  bitterness,  the  throttling  passions  that  drive 
him  almost  to  the  verge  of  madness,  there  is  always 
heard  the  deeper  ground  note  of  Hamlet's  innermost 


130  THe  American  Stage 

nature — a  note  of  spiritual  gentleness  and  native  peace. 
It  is  this  note  that  Shakespeare  sounds  again  with 
such  incomparably  simple  loveliness  in  those  all  but 
final  words: 

"Absent  thee  from  felicity  a  while, 
And  in  this  harsh  world  draw  thy  breath  in  pain 
To  tell  my  story" — 

words  that  mark  fitly  to  every  intelligence  and  every 
heart  the  passing  of  the  "sweet  prince"  of  Horatio's 
last  salutation. 

Among  the  details  of  Mr.  Sothern's  technique  it  is 
to  be  remarked  that  he  speaks  the  verse  as  verse  and 
yet  as  authentic  human  speech.  He  conveys  an  im- 
pression of  complete  naturalness  while  never  slurring 
the  iambic  pattern  of  his  text.  He  uses  his  voice 
throughout  like  a  man  speaking  out  his  insistent 
thoughts  and  not,  as  Shakespearean  actors  with  fine 
voices  are  tempted  to  do,  like  a  musical  instrument. 
His  diction  is  beautifully  clear  without  being  over 
elaborate.  One  may  merely  regret  that  he  sticks  to  the 
ugly  and  foolish  old  habit  of  improperly  sounding  the 
"y"  in  "my"  and  "myself."  His  admirable  realism 
should  not  have  stopped  at  so  annoying  a  trifle.  In 
his  movements  and  gestures  he  has  equally  heeded  his 
author's  warning  concerning  the  modesty  of  nature. 
He  strikes  no  poses,  his  mantle  falls  into  no  statuesque 
folds.    He  gestures  very  little  with  his  arms,  but  his 


The  Lonely  Classics  131 

hands  have  the  fevered  motions  of  a  highly  nervous 
nature  under  great  emotional  stress.  .  In  brief,  his  per- 
formance is  so  refreshing  and  important  because  it 
lends  to  a  character  which  the  centuries  have  over- 
laden with  curious  thoughts  and  with  the  dust  of  per- 
ished mannerisms  and  traditions  a  living  validity  so 
complete  and  a  reality  so  immediate  that,  to  one  spec- 
tator at  least,  he  revived  the  music  of  a  great  poem 
that  had  fallen  a  little  silent  amid  the  many  noises  of 
life,  and  brought  that  almost  legendary  figure  back 
again  into  the  gloom  and  glory  of  the  human  earth. 

III.    The  Life  and  Death  of  Richard  III 

From  the  third  part  of  King  Henry  VI  and  from 
King  Richard  III  a  skilled  and  sensitive  hand  has 
shaped  a  biographical  play  in  three  acts  and  sixteen 
scenes  concerning  the  life  and  death  of  Richard  of 
Gloucester.  For  this  drama  Mr.  Robert  Edmond 
Jones  has  built  scenery  of  a  dark  and  naked  magnifi- 
cence. His  Tower  of  London  blends  the  architectural 
reaUty  with  all  one's  imaginative  visions  of  a  harsh, 
bloody,  and  turbulent  age.  The  throne  room  is  rich 
and  beautiful,  but  its  very  lines  and  patterns  accord 
with  the  swift  and  cruel  fate  of  these  transitory  kings. 

Through  these  scenes  John  Barrymore,  clad  in  vary- 
ing bursts  of  color,  limps  as  Richard  of  Gloucester — 
slow,  sinister,  almost  feeble,  hiding  yet  accentuating 
the  deformities  that  have  so  wrought  upon  his  soul. 


132  The  'American  Stage 

He  wears  an  orange  doublet  that  glows  more  bril- 
liantly for  the  glossy  sable  of  his  hose;  wrapped  in 
a  scarlet  cloak  he  sits  on  a  white  horse  between  the 
dark  robes  of  a  cardinal  and  the  gray  wall  of  the 
Tower;  he  flashes  in  a  suit  of  golden  armor.  His  face 
is  like  a  dagger — now  glittering,  now  dull.  It  sheathes 
its  malevolence  or  strikes  out.  But  there  is  this  strange 
and  unearthly  thing  about  its  temper:  it  breaks  but 
it  does  not  melt.  The  art  of  Mr.  Barrymore,  which  is 
eager  and  self-conscious  and  flexible,  has  not  been  able 
to  mold  into  the  flowing  curves  of  life  the  rigid  medi- 
eval psychology  of  his  hero.  He  has  striven  toward 
that  end,  but  the  result  is  only  a  gorgeous  artifice. 
He  begins  upon  a  note  of  tragic  self-pity: 

Then,  since  the  heavens  have  shaped  my  body  so, 
Let  hell  make  crook'd  my  mind  to  answer  it. 

It  is,  in  his  rendering,  the  cry  of  a  wounded  spirit  that 
would,  like  his  Gianetto  in  BeneUi's  Jest,  build  a  pro- 
tective armor  about  its  own  infirmity — there  more  of 
ciaft,  here  of  ruthlessness.  And  he  lets  Richard  rise 
to  a  very  modern  cry  of  self-justification  in  the  words 
"I  am  myself  alone."  But  at  once  this  interpretation 
conflicts  with  the  medieval  ethical  conventions  of  the 
Shakespeare  of  1593.  A  cripple  stung  to  monstrous 
deeds  by  his  own  sensitiveness  would  be  aware  of  his 
own  inner  qualities;  his  conflict  would  not  have  left 
him  without  a  presentiment  of  the  relative  aspect  of 


The  Lonely  Classics  133 

the  moral  life.  Shakespeare,  of  course,  cared  little  for 
that.  Richard  is  villain  through  and  through.  He 
knows  that  the  murdered  Edward  was  a  good  man  and 
that  he  is  a  plain  doer  of  evil  "whose  all  not  equals 
Edward's  moiety."  He  does  not  play  with  shadings  or 
excuses.  So  Mr.  Barrymore,  to  give  continuity  to  his 
conception,  lends  Richard  a  mordant  and  cynical  hu- 
mor in  whose  very  wildness  and  excess  there  is  a  hint 
of  the  old  pain.  And  the  text  does,  indeed,  fully  bear 
out  the  sinister  humor,  as  in  Gloucester's 

Cannot  a  plain  man  live  and  think  no  harm? 

or  in  his  swift  baiting  of  Margaret,  or  in  the  answer 
to  his  mother's  question  "Art  thou  my  son?" 

Ay,  I  thank  God,  my  father,  and  yourself. 

But  in  the  text  this  humor  is  like  the  sparks  struck 
from  a  flint;  it  neither  hides  nor  betrays  a  malady  of 
the  soul.  It  is  a  part  of  what  Richard  himself  calls 
his  "naked  villainy"  which,  for  mere  effectiveness,  he 
clothes 

With  old,  odd  ends  stolen  out  of  holy  writ. 

Throughout  the  whole  of  what  is,  in  this  represen- 
tation, the  third  act,  Mr.  Barrymore  lets  Richard  show 
a  disintegration  of  the  spirit  that  is  expressed  by  a 


134  ^^^  American  Stage 

growing  feebleness  and  feverishness  of  speech  and 
bodily  gesture.  It  was,  obviously,  his  only  refuge  from 
his  authoj.  For  again  the  text  plays  him  false.  Rich- 
ard is  broken  by  danger  from  without  and  by  defeat 
in  the  field.  The  ghosts  of  his  murdered  men  and 
women  are  ghosts  risen  from  a  medieval  purgatory  to 
blast  and  damn  him.  They  are  not  the  crystallization 
of  a  long  and  suppressed  spiritual  agony.  They  do 
not  symbolize  his  conscience;  they  awaken  it.  Mr. 
Barrymore's  Richard  has  a  tragedy  of  the  inner  life; 
Shakespeare's  chronicle  illustrates  the  fact  that  even 
the  cleverest  and  strongest  scoundrel  is  punished  in 
the  end.  In  the  tent  scene  on  Bosworth  field  Mr.  Bar- 
rymore  has  a  rich  and  resonant  moment  in  the  awaken- 
ing from  that  fearful  sleep.  But  in  this  very  moment 
he  is  forced  to  belie  his  own  conception  wholly.  For 
his  Richard,  stung  to  excess  and  crime  by  the  bitter- 
ness of  fate,  would  have  found  pity  for  himself  within 
himself;  his  conscience  would  have  used  those  "several 
thousand  tongues"  before,  or  else  he  would  have  sought 
to  transcend  it  and  would  have  hurled  his  defiance 
against  the  very  ministers  of  doom.  The  medieval 
villain,  having  determined  upon  his  course,  dispensed 
with  conscience  until  hell  and  vengeance  found  him  out. 
Not  a  medieval  villain  of  flesh  and  blood,  of  course, 
who  being  human  was  divided  and  tormented,  but  the 
villain  of  the  medieval  Christian  tradition  whom  the 
young  Shakespeare  accepted  in  all  but  the  customary 


The  Lonely  Classics  [135 

inhumanity  and  in  the  customary  unashamed  homiletic 
intention. 

The  performance,  despite  the  discrepancy  between 
its  own  central  motivation  and  the  Shakespearean  text, 
is  an  arresting  and  even  a  fascinating  one.  But  it  is 
not  really  great.  Mr.  Barrymore  has  moments  of  the 
highest  histrionic  effectiveness;  he  allures  and  dazzles. 
But  the  word  histrionic  with  all  its  connotations  stands 
between  him  and  the  spirit  from  which  greatness  issues. 
He  misses  here,  as  he  missed  in  Tolstoi's  Redemption, 
the  note  of  an  ultimate  sincerity.  He  does  not  lose 
himself;  he  is  not  consumed  in  the  flame  of  his  own 
creative  imagination.  We  watch  John  Barrymore  do- 
ing marvelous  things,  and  he  watches  himself  with  an 
eager  appreciation  and  applause.  He  permits  himself 
to  be  surrounded,  notably  here,  by  large  companies  of 
very  inferior  actors  who  play  in  subdued  tones,  raise 
his  personality  into  an  immoderate  relief,  and  shatter 
the  drama  which  he  feigns  to  interpret.  One  quality 
only  his  Richard  adds  to  those  with  which  we  are 
already  familiar  in  him.  His  diction  is  wholly  beauti- 
ful— clear,  scholarly,  and  eloquent.  He  has,  evidently, 
the  finest  rhythmic  sense.  The  verses  of  Richard  III 
do  not  yet  flow  in  massive  and  interlinked  paragraphs 
as  in  the  later  Shakespeare.  Many  of  them  are  end- 
stopped  and  so  a  little  hard  and  stiff.  Mr.  Barrymore 
observes  the  versification  very  scrupulously  and  yet 
wrings  from  the  lines  their  utmost  of  musical  value. 


136  TKe  American  Stage 

As  a  declamation,  in  the  best  sense,  his  performance  is 
therefore  beyond  praise.  As  acting,  it  suffers  from  a 
display  of  personal  idiosyncrasy  and  untempered 
power. 

IV.    Macbeth  in  the  Void 

The  production  of  Macbeth  by  Mr.  Arthur  Hop- 
kins, Mr.  Robert  Edmond  Jones,  and  Mr.  Lionel  Bar- 
rymore  raises  an  old  and  fundamental  question. 
Neither  an  uninstructed  dislike  nor  a  sophisticated 
approbation  touch  it  at  all.  When  Mr.  Hopkins  de- 
clared that  he  and  his  associates  had  left  behind  "all 
compromise  with  realism,"  he  flung  that  essential  ques- 
tion nakedly  at  us  and  anyone  moderately  familiar 
with  certain  artistic  tendencies  of  the  day  could  have 
foretold  the  result.  The  mimetic  function  of  art  was 
to  be  reduced  to  a  minimum.  Mr.  Jones  himself  could 
not  have  dreamed  that  it  would  quite  cease  from  activ- 
ity. Our  eeriest  and  wildest  imaginings  still  draw  their 
elements  from  experience.  His  jagged  boards  cut  by 
pointed  arches  have  their  ultimate  origin  in  medieval 
architecture;  the  masks  of  his  weird  sisters  derive, 
after  all,  from  the  lineaments  of  the  human  face.  The 
imagination  cannot  work  in  the  void,  and  abstract 
beauty  is  a  contradiction  in  terms.  What  is  the  utmost, 
then,  that  the  artist  can  do?  He  can  strip  art  of  one 
element  of  concreteness  after  another;  he  can  get  to 
an  irreducible  minimum;  he  can  take  this  irreducible 


THe  Lonely  Classics  II 37 

minimum  and  "stylicize"  it.  Thus  he  can  get  as  far 
from  realism  as  possible  and  land  straight  in  a  hard 
and  shallow  formalism.  For  these  irreducible  symbols 
have  an  ugly  tendency  to  become  as  constant  and  as 
rigid  as  hierogl3^hics.  The  rococo  period  also  stripped 
life  in  art  and  shut  up  the  residuum  in  symbols  and 
substituted  for  the  rough  and  beautiful  multiformity 
of  the  world  the  gardens  of  Watteau  and  the  meads  of 
Pope. 

The  perfectly  sincere  intention  of  such  an  unwilling- 
ness to  compromise  with  reality  is  to  raise  art  to  a 
higher  significance,  to  omit  everything  that  is  not 
packed  with  meaning,  to  make  a  play,  for  instance,  as 
Mr.  Hopkins  put  it,  "a  play  of  all  times  and  all  peo- 
ple." But  in  this  train  of  speculation  there  is  involved 
a  false  analogy.  If  it  were  possible  to  drain  art  so 
wholly  of  the  concrete  and  the  fluctuating  as  to  uni- 
versalize its  meaning  in  that  bleak  and  literal  sense,  it 
would  cease  to  be  art  and  become  mathematics.  An 
algebraic  formula  expresses  an  exact  and  universal 
truth.  But  it  is  not  a  truth  that  will  make  the  pulse 
quicken;  it  is  not  a  truth  that  can  be  touched  with 
hands.  This  ultra-S5mibolism  may,  with  the  utmost 
sobriety,  be  said  to  be  flying  into  the  face  of  Provi- 
dence. Man  is  no  abstract  spirit.  To  make  him  typi- 
cal is  to  traduce  him.  Nor  is  he  merely  clothed  in  his 
flesh  and  his  world.  He  is  embodied  so  and  only  so. 
He  and  his  world  interpenetrate  each  other.    To  tear 


138  The  American  Stage 

the  two  asunder  is  to  maim  both  beyond  healing,  and 
to  rob  both  of  significance  by  obliterating  their  essen- 
tial characters.  There  can  be  nothing  in  art  which 
was  not  first  in  life.  Hence  art  is  significant  in  pro- 
portion to  the  richness  of  its  vital  content  in  terms  of 
flesh  and  gear  and  grass  and  stones  and  winds.  Stick 
to  the  elemental,  if  you  choose.  Nakedness  can  be 
great,  but  not  symbolic  swathings  about  a  core  of  noth- 
ingness. Life  has  an  atmosphere  which  art  can  pro- 
ject. Abstract  atmosphere  does  not  exist.  The  most 
entrancing  fragrance  is  still  the  fragrance  of  some 
earthly  object.  Particles  of  its  material  substance  de- 
tach themselves  and  thud  faintly  against  the  olfactory 
nerve.  We  cannot  smell  anything  unless  there  is  some- 
thing to  smell.  We  cannot  feel  anything  from  art  un- 
less art  is  the  expression  of  life  in  a  concrete,  recog- 
nizable embodiment. 

This  is  no  plea  for  historical  accuracy  or  creeping 
correctness  or  a  pedantic  adherence  to  the  Shakespear- 
ean text.  It  was,  for  instance,  quite  legitimate  to  divide 
Macbeth  into  three  moral  episodes  centering  respec- 
tively in  the  murder  scene,  the  banquet-hall  scene,  and 
the  sleep-walking  scene.  It  was,  indeed,  a  high  and 
sensitive  intelligence  that  set  the  play  to  this  spiritual 
and  artistic  rhythm.  But  those  scenes  themselves  with 
their  heavy  and  monotonous  coloring,  their  cubist  lum- 
ber, their  as5maetrical  polygons  and  lathe  triangles,  are 
dreary  beyond  measure.    And  they  are  dreary  not  be- 


The  Lonely  Classics  139 

cause  they  mean  only  the  essential  but  because,  from 
the  nature  of  things,  they  can  mean  nothing  at  all. 
At  the  end  of  the  banquet-hall  scene  there  is  a  single 
moment  of  human  forlornness  and  of  mortal  ache. 
That  moment  could  be  felt  because  here,  at  least,  can- 
dles burned  and  tables  bore  pewter  cups  and  there 
arose  the  semblance  of  a  habitation  of  man.  But  that 
image  fades  once  more  from  the  eye  and  the  mind  and 
Lady  Macbeth  falters,  holding  a  pathetically  real  little 
lamp,  among  decorations  so  meaningless,  because  so 
unrelated  to  reality,  that  all  the  pity  of  her  distracted 
soul  cannot  shield  our  nerves  from  the  assault  of  the 
boat-like  hulks  in  the  foreground. 

The  final  and  supreme  oddity  of  this  production  is 
that  Macbeth,  the  "man  possessed"  of  Mr.  Hopkins's 
explanation,  is  impersonated  by  Mr.  Lionel  Barrymore 
as  a  creature  of  no  tragic  austerity,  no  vision  of  fatality, 
no  splendor,  and  no  gloom.  He  is  rough,  sordid,  unin- 
telligent, ignoble.  He  is  not  a  hero  caught  in  the  toils 
of  fate;  he  is  a  beast  in  a  trap.  The  husky  voice,  the 
lumbering  movement,  the  shifty  vision,  the  tangled 
beard,  the  feeble  exultation  and  ferocity  all  combine 
to  project  the  idea  of  a  common,  heavy,  spiritually 
soggy  man  who  never  approached  the  stature  of  his 
*fate.  Perhaps  this  is  a  legitimate  interpretation  of  the 
murderous  Scotch  thane  who,  according  to  Holinshed, 
was  always  known  to  be  "somewhat  cruell  of  nature." 
Nor  is  it  to  be  denied  that  Mr.  Barr3miore  carries  out 


140  TKe  American  Stage 

his  conception  with  an  unrelenting  consistency.  But 
what  conceivable  relation  could  such  a  conception  of 
Macbeth  have  been  thought  to  sustain  to  the  mystical 
abstractions  which  employed  the  mind  of  Mr.  Hopkins 
and  the  eye  of  Mr.  Jones?  Miss  Julia  Arthur's  Lady 
Macbeth,  though  feeble  and  subdued,  does  not,  at  least, 
wrench  herself  out  of  the  frame  of  these  eerie  pictures 
and  bring  the  whole  decorative  scheme  tumbling  down. 
Of  the  entire  production,  then,  the  final  word  must  be 
that  the  best  and  strongest  forces  in  our  living  theatre, 
that  fine  intelligence  and  something  not  unlike  genius, 
have  been  wasted  here  for  the  want  of  some  close  and 
scrupulous  reflection  on  the  character  and  the  possibili- 
ties of  the  artistic  process  itself.  One's  consolation  is 
that  those  forces  are  actually  with  us  and  that  a  single 
mistake  cannot  greatly  enfeeble  or  diminish  them. 

V.     The  Beggar's  Opera 

Spence's  anecdote  of  how  Swift  once  observed  to 
Gay  "what  an  odd,  pretty  sort  of  thing  a  Newgate  Pas- 
toral might  make,"  how  The  Beggar's  Opera  came  to 
be  written,  and  how  Congreve,  having  read  the  manu- 
script, remarked  that  "it  would  either  take  greatly  or 
be  damned  confoundedly,"  is  a  commonplace  of  a  hun- 
dred classrooms.  It  is  also  known  that  the  piece  did 
take  greatly,  that  it  made  Rich  the  manager  gay,  and 
Gay  the  author  rich,  that  the  actress  who  took  the 
part  of  Polly  married  an  earl,  and  that  Hogarth  painted 


The  Lonely  Classics  14L 

the  whole  triumphant  company.  But  the  opera  itself 
drifted  into  gradual  forgetfulness.  The  early  nine- 
teenth century  revivals  were  bowdlerized,  softened,  and 
sweetened.  Johnson,  to  be  sure,  had  said:  "I  do  not 
believe  that  any  man  was  ever  made  a  rogue  by  being 
present  at  its  representation."  But  he  had  afterwards 
added  in  order  to  give,  Boswell  tells  us,  a  heavy  stroke, 
that  "there  is  in  it  such  a  labefactation  of  all  principles 
as  may  be  injurious  to  morality."  The  "labefactation" 
theory  prevailed  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic.  In 
America,  moreover,  if  we  are  to  believe  Hazlitt,  "this 
sterling  satire  was  hooted  off  the  stage,"  because  the 
Americans  "have  no  such  state  of  matters  as  it  de- 
scribes before  their  eyes  and  have  no  conception  of 
anything  but  what  they  see."  Virtue  or  ignorance,  in 
brief,  robbed  the  English-speaking  stage  for  over  a 
century  of  this  strong,  witty,  and  delightful  work. 

Its  very  character  came  to  be  a  matter  of  dispute. 
It  is,  first  of  all,  a  dramatic  satire  in  the  exact  taste  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  To  ascribe  to  highwaymen 
and  women  of  the  town  the  pseudo-noble  sentiments 
and  swelling  speech  which  courtly  life  had  borrowed 
from  the  pastoral  tradition  was  obviously  amusing  to 
a  fashionable  audience  of  1728.  That  audience  was 
also,  in  its  own  way,  politically  minded  and  relished  the 
secondary  intention  by  at  once  identifying  Peachum 
and  Lockit  with  Walpole  and  Townshend.  So  much 
for  the  satiric  substance.   It  was  the  form  of  The  Beg- 


142  The  American  Stage 

gar's  Opera  that  made  it  an  unmistakable  burlesque  of 
the  Italian  opera.  Whenever  the  action  touches  emo- 
tion the  characters  drop  speech  and  express  themselves 
in  sudden  arias.  This  was  the  technique  of  every  opera 
before  Gluck  and  remains  customary  in  the  cruder 
type  of  operetta  to  this  day.  Contemporary  witnesses 
are  quite  clear  on  this  point.  The  Companion  of  the 
Playhouse  asserted  that  The  Beggar's  Opera  overthrew 
for  a  time  the  Italian  opera,  "that  Dagon  of  the  Nobil- 
ity and  Gentry,  who  has  so  long  seduced  them  to  idol- 
atry." A  final  bit  of  evidence  that  has  not  always  been 
given  its  due  weight  is  the  fact  that  the  Italian  opera 
company  managed  by  Handel  and  Bononcini  failed  in 
the  very  year  of  Gay's  success. 

The  London  production  of  Mr.  Nigel  Playfair  which 
Mr.  Arthur  Hopkins  has  brought  to  America  gives  us 
The  Beggar's  Opera  in  a  form  as  close  to  the  original 
as  our  modern  lack  of  leisure  permits.  The  satire  now 
reaches  us  with  all  its  cold,  sardonic  force.  It  is  bril- 
liantly gay,  but  with  a  cruel  sort  of  gaiety.  The  Duke 
of  Argyle  in  his  box  on  that  first  night  of  January  29, 
1728,  was  quite  sure  that  the  play  "would  do."  He 
was  equally  sure  that  all  rogues  ought  to  be  hanged 
and  that  to  make  game  of  them  before  hanging  was 
vastly  good  sport.  The  reprieve  given  to  MacHeath  at 
the  last  moment  does  not  soften  the  inner  tone  which 
the  piece  shares  with  the  comedy  of  Congreve.  This 
high-spirited  mercilessness  was  no  doubt  in  part  a  lit- 


TKe  Lonely  Classics  143 

erary  convention.  But  such  conventions  answer  to  a 
prevalent  mood.  To-day  that  mood  can  be  accepted  as 
a  purely  artistic  one  within  which  there  live  such  in- 
comparable verve  and  grace,  elegance  and  wit.  The 
verses  are  as  hard  but  also  as  translucent  as  clear  agate; 
the  satiric  thrusts  in  the  dialogue  glitter  like  rapiers 
and  glide  home.  We  are  very  fine  fellows  to-day  and 
transcend  the  age  of  Anne  in  all  our  thinking.  But  we 
have  not  its  magnificent  perfection  of  literary  skill,  its 
power  of  sheer  writing  on  little  things  or  great.  Our 
musical  comedy  lyrists  do  not  compose  verses  like  Gay; 
no  pamphlet  on  the  Irish  question  rivals  the  Drapier's 
Letters  of  Swift. 

There  remains  the  music,  which  will  appeal  more 
strongly  to  modern  audiences  than  the  wit  or  action 
of  the  fable.  The  airs  were  all,  in  their  origin,  folk- 
tunes,  and  students  of  popular  song  complain  that  the 
transcriptions  were  not  faithful  and  that  the  rhythm 
and  the  whole  modal  character  was  changed.  The  lover 
of  music  who  is  not  a  specialist  need  not  regret  this. 
It  was  the  age  of  Handel,  a  march  from  whose  opera 
Rinaldo  (1711)  is  actually  introduced.  To  the  mod- 
ern ear  the  airs  seem  all  to  melt  into  the  mood  and 
pattern  of  the  music  of  that  age,  to  share  its  lovely 
and  pure  simplicity  of  melodic  line,  its  clear  and  sober 
gravity,  its  compact  and  finite  charm.  This  music  is  as 
innocent  as  the  gods.  It  knows  neither  regret  nor 
yearning.    It  is  not  always,  not  even  generally,  gay. 


144  ^^^  American  Stage 

But  the  sadness  never  cries  or  rebels.  It  accepts  and 
expresses  itself  as  a  plain  fact  like  any  other.  The 
melodies  are  neither  like  homeless  souls  nor  like  gar- 
dens in  the  rain;  they  are  like  Grecian  urns  set  in  the 
cool  shadow  of  a  well-trimmed  tree.  The  dances  are 
as  grave  and  graceful  as  the  tunes,  and  but  for  the 
secondary  matter  of  decorative  skill  the  earliest  of  all 
musical  comedies  may  still  be  said  to  be  also  the  best. 


Ill 

Contemporaries 


The  French  Theatre  of  To-day 

It  is  a  tradition  of  the  French  theatre  to  conquer  the 
world.  The  classics  of  the  seventeenth  century  ruled 
the  stages  of  Europe  until  the  coming  of  Lessing  and 
of  the  Romantic  age.  In  the  nineteenth  century  the 
playwrights  of  France  once  more  took  possession  of 
the  theatre.  But  that  second  conquest  was  wholly  dif- 
ferent from  the  first.  The  classics  of  the  great  age 
summed  up  and  embodied  the  living  ideal  of  every  neo- 
classicist  in  the  world.  They  achieved  what  all  desired 
to  attempt.  They  were  copied  through  an  inner  con- 
viction. But  romanticism  destroyed  the  continuous 
surface  of  European  culture.  It  left  literature  concrete 
in  substance  and  national  in  temper.  Sardou  and  Scribe 
swept  across  Europe  not  because  they  expressed  an 
ideal,  but  because  they  expressed  none  whatever.  Their 
plays  could  gleam  for  a  moment  in  any  climate  because 
they  were  rooted  in  no  soil.  With  Augier  and  the 
younger  Dumas  French  drama  almost  attained  another 
European  hour  in  the  older  and  nobler  sense.  But 
soon  the  society  plays  derived  from  the  works  of  these 
two  became  a  by- word.  When  finally  France  created 
a  modern  drama  of  her  own,  the  business  of  dramatic 
exportation  fell  off.    The  masterpieces  of  her  new  the- 

147 


148  Contemporaries 

atre — Les  Cor  beaux,  Amour euse,  Les  Fossiles,  Con- 
nais-toi,  Le  Pardon,  Amants,  Les  Hannetons — though 
far  more  universal  because  far  more  concrete,  have 
stayed  at  home.  Yet  the  average  theatre-goer  bases 
his  vague  and  simple  faith  in  the  supremacy  of  the 
French  stage  not  upon  these  plays  of  which  he  has 
never  heard,  but  on  the  persistence  of  the  French  skill 
of  manufacturing  for  export  the  trade-goods  of  the 
theatre — Bisson's  Mme.  X.,  Bernstein's  Thief,  and  the 
books  of  Revues  and  musical  comedies.  These  prod- 
ucts are  analogous  to  others  for  which  milliners  have 
invented  the  dreadful  word  "Frenchy." 

The  trouble  with  Mr.  Frank  Wadleigh  Chandler's 
useful  and  very  learned  book.  The  Contemporary 
Drama  of  France,^  is  its  light-hearted  neglect  of  such 
distinctions.  He  has  read  one  thousand  plays  by  two 
hundred  and  thirty  authors.  He  gives  as  much  space 
to  Bernstein  as  to  Hervieu  and  almost  as  much  to  Ba- 
taille  as  to  Curel.  He  thinks  that  brassy  melodrama 
Le  Marquis  de  Priola  "sternly  tragic,"  and  finds  room 
for  synopses  of  hundreds  of  plays  which,  to  use  his  own 
description  of  Le  Voleur,  afford  "no  criticism  of  life" 
and  are  "even  highly  improbable."  Then  why  dwell 
on  such  a  play?  Because  "as  a  bit  of  clever  drama- 
turgy it  has  rarely  been  excelled."  On  the  same  prin- 
ciple Kistemaeckers  is  described  as  "a  master  of  stage- 

1  The  Contemporary  Drama  of  France.    By  Frank  Wadleijfh 
Chandler. 


The  French  Theatre  of  To-day         149 

craft."  Mr.  Chandler,  in  a  word,  exhibits  that  blank 
awe  which  strikes  so  many  admirable  academic  minds 
among  us  at  the  mere  sight  of  a  hollow  technical  dex- 
terity. The  truth  is,  of  course,  that  these  masters  of 
stagecraft  do  not  enter  the  history  of  the  drama  except 
as  background,  contrasts,  or  curiosities,  any  more  than 
the  versifiers  of  the  "smart"  or  comic  press  enter  the 
history  of  poetry.  All  of  these  people  may  be  regarded 
as  clever  craftsmen.  All  understand  the  application 
of  technical  processes  to  their  particular  ends.  But  ask 
poets  or  painters  whether,  in  the  memorable  word  of 
Lemaitre,  these  craftsmen  "exist"  and  come  within  the 
limits  of  criticism  at  all.  Our  professors  of  literature 
must,  somehow,  be  persuaded  to  draw  nearer  to  the 
living  practice  of  the  arts  whose  progress  they  would 
chronicle. 

But  to  anyone  familiar  with  its  subject,  Mr.  Chan- 
dler's busy  heaping  of  synopsis  on  synopsis  and  of 
name  on  name  confirms  the  massive  impression  that  the 
French  drama  has  fallen  upon  evil  days.  Not  one  of 
the  younger  men  shares  the  beautiful  eloquence  of 
Porto-Riche,  the  elegiac  grace  of  Donnay,  the  high 
seriousness  of  Hervieu,  or  even  the  brilliant  rhetorical 
fecundity  of  Rostand.  Nor  is  there  any  creative  ex- 
perimentation within  the  art  of  the  theatre.  The  old, 
rigid,  mechanical  technique  prevails.  And  since  that 
technique  cannot  be  used  without  a  rearrangement  of 
the  material  of  life  guided  solely  by  the  exigencies  of 


I^O  Contemporaries 

external  effectiveness,  the  monotony  of  the  subject  mat- 
ter is  overwhelming.  The  human  triangles  pass  before 
us  in  an  unending  procession.  Slight  variations  are  in- 
finite, the  foundations  and  essential  reactions  are  the 
same.  There  is  indulgence,  there  is  renunciation.  But 
both  seem  mere  gestures  and  quite  rigid,  and  the  rich- 
ness and  the  burning  tragedy  of  life  are  far  to  seek. 
The  World  War  did  not  destroy  the  triangle.  The  tri- 
angle  simply  went  to  war.  Bernstein  wrote  UElevation 
and  Bataille  U Amazon,  and  the  lovers  who  err  or  were 
about  to  err  are  uplifted  by  sacrifice.  They  go  and  sin 
no  more,  while  the  offended  spouses  exhaust  themselves 
with  nobility  and  forgiveness  and  faith  to  the  immor- 
tal dead.  It  is  the  very  rhetoric  of  the  emotions — false 
and  metallic.  One  turns,  with  warm  relief,  to  the  more 
natural  and  Gallic  gusto  and  gaiety  of  Feydeau's  On 
purge  Bibi  and  Mais  n'te  promdne  done  pas  toute  nuel 
The  great  spirits  and  the  great  artists  of  modern 
France — the  sage  and  stylist  Anatole  France,  the  nov- 
elist and  humanitarian  Romain  Rolland,  the  poet  Henri 
de  Regnier — ^have  stood  aloof  from  the  theatre  of  their 
country.  For  that  theatre  is,  despite  exceptions  and 
interludes,  the  theatre  of  the  boulevards,  harsh,  shal- 
low, and  turbulent.  It  has  not  followed  the  sober 
veracity  of  Henri  Becque;  it  has,  uninfluenced  by  the 
repeated  attempts  of  gifted  poets,  found  no  home  within 
itself  for  the  realities  of  the  soul.  To  succeed  in  it  has 
been,  commonly,  to  be  corrupted  by  it.    There  is  Henri 


The  French  Theatre  of  To-day         151 

Bataille.  He  commenced  his  literary  career  as  a  poet 
and  wrote  La  Chambre  blanche.  The  verses  are  of  an 
exquisite  spiritual  delicacy  and  are  full  of  the  strange 
loveliness  and  twilight  glimmer  that  common  things 
and  experiences  take  on  in  the  imagination  of  childhood 
and  adolescence.  Their  music  is  soft  and  wavering  as 
the  notes  of  a  violin  heard  across  fields  at  dusk.  Then 
he  turned  to  the  stage,  and,  after  tentative  plays 
of  a  poetic  character,  produced  L'Enchantement,  Le 
Masque,  and  the  widely  discussed  Mafnan  Colibri.  The 
dreary  adulteries  of  dreary  people  had  become  his  sole 
preoccupation.  And  these  characters  do  not  come  into 
conflict  with  society  or  the  state  or  others  in  the  pur- 
suit of  inner  freedom  or  at  the  urge  of  any  creative 
force.  Hence  the  final  act  can  never  end  with  an  inher- 
ent triumph  or  defeat,  but  must  always  be  built  about 
some  shocking  absurdity  of  plot  or  motivation.  It  is 
precisely  the  glib  craftsmanship  of  which  Mr.  Chandler 
makes  so  much  that  is  responsible  for  such  a  condition 
of  the  drama.  The  French  playwrights  neither  dom- 
inate nor  re-create  the  stage  to  their  uses.  They  serve 
it  and  are  ensnared  by  its  supposed  conventions  and 
laws.  Not  till  they  have  destroyed  it  will  they  make 
it  live.  V 


The  German  Theatre  of  To-day 

There  is  a  saying  current  in  Vienna  now:  two  places 
are  crowded — the  graveyards  and  the  theatres.  It  is 
true  of  all  the  German-speaking  countries.  Their  the- 
atre has  survived  a  disastrous  war;  it  is  surviving  de- 
spair and  bitter  famine.  And  it  does  so  because  for 
many  years  and  to  many  thousands  it  has  been  a  source 
of  neither  mere  amusement  nor  mere  instruction  but, 
as  expression  and  liberation,  an  integral  part  of  the  life 
process  itself.  In  a  t5^ical  theatrical  season  before  the 
war  we  find  Sudermann,  to  be  sure,  leading  all  living 
pla5rwrights  with  1,344  performances.  But  Shake- 
speare surpasses  him  with  1,484  and  Schiller  with 
1,381.  Hauptmann  leads  the  great  moderns  with  800 
performances  and  Ibsen  follows  him  with  600.  Plays 
by  Goethe,  Lessing,  Kleist,  Grillparzer,  Hebbel,  Bjorn- 
son,  Hartleben,  and  Dreyer  total  far  over  2,000  per- 
formances. And  that  theatre  was  then  and  is  now 
guided  and  interpreted  by  a  criticism  of  high  and,  at 
times,  almost  perverse  severity.  The  reviewers  on  the 
chief  daily  papers — Eloesser,  Weitbrecht,  Kerr,  Bab — 
watch  themselves  with  jealous  strictness.  The  luxury 
of  a  concession  to  the  flabby  or  the  false  is  unknown. 

152 


The  German  Theatre  of  To-day        153 

In  a  recent  volume,  full  of  a  somber  intellectual 
energy  to  the  brim,  Julius  Bab^  chronicles  the  chief 
happenings  on  the  German  stage  from  1911  to  191 9. 
These  years  mark,  primarily,  the  passing  of  natural- 
ism. Halbe  and  Hirschfeld  continued  to  write,  but 
their  inner  development  had  ceased.  Hauptmann,  long 
drawing  closer  to  the  poet  within  himself,  became  a 
master  and  leader  of  the  youngest  generation.  Schnitz- 
ler  and  Schonherr,  to  both  of  whom  Bab  is  less  than 
just,  wrote  plays  in  their  characteristic  moods  which 
had  never  been  those  of  the  consistent  naturalists  of 
the  North.  But  the  early  neo-romantics  who,  influ- 
enced by  Maeterlinck  and  the  Viennese  lyrists,  led  the 
first  revolt  against  naturalism,  faded  in  their  turn.  Or 
all  but  one.  For  in  Ariadne  auj  Naxos  the  vision  of 
Hofmannsthal  deepened  and  his  verse  gained  clarity 
without  losing  richness  or  magic.  Among  the  older 
men  who  kept  their  position  firmly  and  whose  works 
the  unquiet  youth  of  these  fateful  years  held  to  be,  in 
a  more  intimate  sense,  its  own,  was  Herbert  Eulenberg, 
the  poetic  psychologist  of  doom  and  of  excessive  pas- 
sion, and  the  cold,  perverse,  essentially  uncreative 
Frank  Wedekind. 

The  exact  character  of  Wedekind's  power  over  the 
younger  generation  can  be  best  observed  in  the  plays  of 
Carl  Sternheim  and  Georg  Kaiser.    Both  have  richer 

1  Der  Wille  sum  Drama.  Von  Julius  Bab,  Berlin :  Oesterheld 
und  Compagnie. 


154  Contemporaries 

natures.  But  what  Wedekind  taught  them  was  how 
to  attain  dramatic  range  through  speed.  He  broke  up 
the  dramatic  continuity  which  he  considered  as  but 
productive  of  a  futile  illusion  and  sought  sweep,  vari- 
ety, and  also  concentration  by  lifting  his  characters  at 
crucial  and  frankly  isolated  moments  out  of  the  dark- 
ness into  a  strong  and  sudden  light.  Within  these  ap- 
parently random  scenes  hurled  on  the  stage  he  likewise 
makes  no  effort  to  produce  an  illusion  of  reality.  All 
gestures  become  symbols;  all  speech  races  toward  its 
ultimate  significance.  A  terrible  yet  hopeless  avidness 
after  the  meaning  of  life  dominates  this  drama,  and 
under  its  cold  cynicism  you  feel  a  stifled  moan  of  pain. 
There  is,  for  instance,  Georg  Kaiser's  Von  Morgens 
bis  Mitternachts.  It  was  successfully  produced  last 
winter  by  Reinhardt  in  Berlin;  the  production  of  an 
English  version  by  Ashley  Dukes  is  promised  by  the 
Incorporated  Stage  Society  of  London.  A  woman's 
perfume  stirs  a  middle-aged  bank  cashier  out  of  the 
lethargy  of  his  life.  He  steals  sixty-thousand  marks. 
In  snowy  fields  he  meets  Death  and  makes  a  compact 
for  a  day's  grace.  He  glances  into  his  home  to  con- 
firm within  himself  the  conviction  of  its  death  in  life. 
He  goes  to  seek  ecstasy,  fulfilment,  liberation.  At  a 
great  automobile  race  the  crowd  seems  to  soar  beyond 
itself.  But  His  Highness  appears,  the  national  anthem 
is  sung,  and  the  crowd  withers  into  a  herd.  The  cash- 
ier drifts  to  a  public  hall  and  finds  no  ecstasy  of  the 


The  German  Theatre  of  To-day        155 

flesh  but  sodden  barter  and  sale.  He  seeks  "the  infinite 
liberation  from  slavery  and  from  reward"  at  a  meeting 
of  the  Salvation  Army  and  meets  chafferers  over  shop- 
worn emotions.  He  races  to  the  black  cross  stitched 
on  coarse  hangings  in  that  hall  and  shoots  himself. 
"His  moaning  sputters  forth  an  Ecce,  his  last  breath 
gurgles  a  Homo."  He  is  a  martyr  to  the  meaningless 
monotony,  the  commonness,  and  slavery  of  life. 

The  "Expressionisten"  share  the  speed  technique  of 
Wedekind,  Sternheim,  and  Kaiser.  But  they  seek  to 
present  man  solely  in  terms  of  his  inner  conflicts.  Only 
the  protagonist  exists.  The  other  characters,  as  in 
Wilhelm  Hasenclever's  important  and  influential  Der 
Sohn,  are  but  his  subjective  visions  of  reality  which, 
streaming  back  upon  himself,  determine  his  fate.  A 
kindlier  interpretation  of  life,  and  one  less  stripped  of 
actual  things  and  circumstances,  is  offered  by  Wilhelm 
Schmidtbonn;  a  nobler  one,  in  the  older  sense,  by  the 
admirable  but  pathetically  futile  neo-classicists  Paul 
Ernst  and  Wilhelm  von  Scholz.  A  little  apart  from 
these  movements,  yet  honored  within  them  all,  stands 
Gerhart  Hauptmann,  whose  Winterballade  seeks  in  an 
old  Swedish  legend  the  inner  meaning  of  human  sin 
and  atonement,  whose  Der  weisse  Heiland  and  Indi- 
pohdi  summon  Prosper©  from  the  land  of  death  and 
dream  to  lament  over  a  ruined  world. 

The  serious  German  war  plays  are  all  anti-war  plays. 
Carl  Hauptmann's  Krieg,  written  before  the  outbreak 


156  Contemporaries 

of  the  conflict,  predicts  the  destruction  of  human  nobil- 
ity and  goodness  through  the  nature  of  war  itself; 
Stefan  Zweig's  Jeremias  gives  voice  to  the  grief  and 
despair  of  those  thousands  of  Germans  whose  imagina- 
tive insight  and  human  feeling  isolated  them  amid  the 
tribal  orgies  of  19 14;  Hans  Franck's  Freie  Knechte  ex- 
hibits the  tragedy  of  the  enslavement  wrought  by  war 
upon  man  among  the  peasants  of  the  Northern  coast; 
Julius  Maria  Becker's  passion  play,  Das  letzte  Gericht, 
tears  asunder  the  delusion  that  war  is  part  of  the  in- 
herent fate  of  man  and  not  a  product  of  the  murderous 
greed  of  a  few  for  power;  Fritz  von  Unruh,  a  Junker 
,  and  a  Prussian  officer,  embodies  in  the  turbid  passion 
of  Ein  Geschlecht  an  unsurpassable  horror  of  the  self- 
laceration  of  mankind. 

The  war  plays  have  already  faded  a  little  from  view. 
Neither  Kaiser  nor  Schmidtbonn  nor  Zweig  is  of  the 
stature  of  the  men  in  the  generation  that  came  before 
theirs.  But  what  still  distinguishes  the  German  the- 
atre is  its  unfailing  sense  of  the  identity  of  art  and  life. 
All  reputable  dramatists  write  to  project  the  sense  of 
life  that  is  in  them — the  passion  and  the  vision  that 
must,  somehow,  be  uttered.  Hence  they  insist  that  the 
physical  theatre  be  their  servant  and  not  their  master, 
and  they  have  the  cooperation  of  the  leading  managers 
in  all  the  cities  of  Germany.  Criticism  accepts  every 
technical  innovation  and  simply  asks  whether  it  served 


The  German  Theatre  of  To-day        157 

the  dramatic  intention  involved.  Thus  the  art  of  the 
theatre  is  here  a  plastic  and  infinitely  expressive  one. 
It  arises  from  a  hunger  and  addresses  itself  to  a  need 
of  the  soul  of  man. 


Shaw:  Height  and  Decline 

I.     "Impavidum  Ferient  Ruince"^ 

Mr.  H.  L.  Mencken  in  his  sagacious  Prefaces  an- 
nounces the  discovery  that  Bernard  Shaw  is  a  purveyor 
of  platitudes.  What  Mr.  Mencken  really  means  is  that 
the  ripe  and  disciplined  intelligence  of  a  tragically  small 
minority  has  achieved  some  sort  of  contemporaneous- 
ness with  Shaw's  thinking  and  lacks  only  his  articu- 
lateness.  One  wonders,  nevertheless,  whether  Mr. 
Mencken  has  descended  often  enough  from  his  dwell- 
ing place  of  intellectual  aloofness  and  scorn  to  listen 
to  the  ordinary  talk  of  people  admittedly  not  illiterate 
on,  let  us  say,  the  war,  or  the  economic  problems  of  the 
world,  or  art,  or  morals.  It  is  not  the  least  among  the 
great  qualities  of  Bernard  Shaw  that  he  knows  what 
the  world  is  like,  that  his  has  never  been  a  fugitive  and 
cloistered  virtue,  that  he  has  never  slunk  out  of  the 
dust  and  heat  of  the  race.  And  hence  the  evil  days 
that  have  come  upon  us  and  that  have  tarnished  so 
many  escutcheons  of  the  spirit  have  found  him  erect 
and  incorruptible,  the  master  of  himself  and  of  his 
mind.    What  one  discerns,  above  all,  in  Heartbreak 

1  Heartbreak  House,  Great  Catherine  and  Playlets  of  the  War, 
By  Bernard  Shaw. 

158 


Sham:  Height  and  Decline  159 

House  is  the  rare  and  consoling  vision  of  that  just 
man  of  the  Roman  poet  whom,  tenacious  of  his  pur- 
pose, neither  the  fury  of  citizens  demanding  evil  things 
nor  the  countenance  of  a  menacing  tyrant  has  power  to 
shake  in  his  well-founded  mind. 

"All  great  truths,"  Shaw  announces,  "begin  as  blas- 
phemies." He  proceeds  to  utter  in  his  own  person  the 
brave,  necessary  blasphemies  of  the  moment  concern- 
ing the  delirium  of  war,  the  vulgar  attack  on  Germany's 
share  in  the  spiritual  life  of  mankind,  the  true  nature  of 
the  unspeakable  peace.  Truths  of  a  more  startling  but 
also  of  a  more  permanent  character  he  presents  as  hav- 
ing been  arrived  at  through  the  living  experience  of 
people  in  the  grip  of  the  historic  process.  There  is 
O'Flaherty,  the  Irish  V.  C,  who  dared  not  tell  his 
mother  that  he  was  fighting  with  the  English.  "She 
says,"  he  confides  to  the  local  squire  and  pillar  of  the 
Empire,  "all  the  English  generals  is  Irish.  .  .  .  She 
says  we're  the  lost  tribes  of  the  house  of  Israel  and  the 
chosen  people  of  God."  The  squire  is  puzzled  and  out- 
raged. But  O'Flaherty  has,  to  all  appearances,  the 
isoft  answer  that  turneth  away  wrath:  "Yes,  sir,  she's 
pig-headed  and  obstinate;  there's  no  doubt  about  it. 
She's  like  the  English;  they  think  there's  no  one  like 
themselves.  It*s  the  same  with  the  Germans,  though 
they're  educated  and  ought  to  know  better.  Youll 
never  have  a  quiet  world  till  you  knock  the  patriotism 
out  of  the  human  race."    There  is  Annajanska,  the 


i6o  Contemporaries 

Bolshevik  empress  in  the  exuberant  intellectual  farce 
of  that  name.  Into  the  hopeless  muddle  of  political 
authoritarians,  vacillating  between  the  orthodox  sources 
of  power,  a  king  and  a  majority,  she  flings  her  electric 
perception  of  that  reality  from  which  she  derives  her 
right  to  act:  "Some  energetic  and  capable  minority 
must  always  be  in  power.  Well,  I  am  on  the  side  of 
the  energetic  minority  whose  principles  I  agree  with. 
The  Revolution  is  as  cruel  as  we  were,  but  its  aims  are 
my  aims.    Therefore  I  stand  for  the  Revolution." 

Heartbreak  House  was  written  before  the  war.'  It 
is  the  longest  as  well  as  the  most  important  play  in  this 
volume.  It  is  softer  in  tone  than  many  of  Shaw's  plays; 
it  is,  for  him,  extraordinarly  symbolistic  in  fable  and 
structure;  it  has  a  touch  of  weariness  under  the  un- 
flagging energy  of  its  execution.  He  had  seen,  more 
clearly  perhaps  than  any  other  European,  the  ines- 
capable shipwreck  ahead.  He  saw  a  society  divided 
between  "barbarism  and  Capua"  in  which  "power  and 
culture  were  in  separate  compartments."  "Are  we," 
asks  the  half-mythical  Captain  Shotover,  "are  we  to 
be  kept  forever  in  the  mud  by  these  hogs  to  whom  the 
universe  is  nothing  but  a  machine  for  greasing  their 
bristles  and  filling  their  snouts?"  His  children  and 
their  friends  played  at  love  and  art  and  even  at  theo- 
ries of  social  reconstruction.  Meanwhile  the  ship  of 
state  drifted.    "The  captain  is  in  his  bunk,"  Shotover 


Shaw:  Height  and  Decline  i6l 

declares  further  on,  "drinking  bottled  ditch-water,  and 
the  crew  is  gambling  in  the  forecastle."  "We  sit  heire 
talking,"  another  character  remarks,  "and  leave  every- 
thing to  Mangan  [the  capitalistic  swindler]  and  to 
chance  and  to  the  devil."  It  is  precisely  the  same  re- 
proach against  pre-war  Europe  that  Andreas  Latzko  ex- 
presses with  such  ringing  intensity  in  The  Judgment  of 
Peace.  Shaw  prophetically  represents  the  great  catas- 
trophe as  breaking  in  its  most  vivid  and  terrible  form 
upon  Heartbreak  House.  In  the  result  of  the  symbol- 
ical air-raid  he  sounds  a  note  of  fine  and  lasting  hope. 
The  "two  burglars,  the  two  practical  men  of  business" 
are  blown  to  atoms.  So  is  the  parsonage.  "The  poor 
clergyman  will  have  to  get  a  new  house."  There  is  left 
the  patient  idealist  who  pities  the  poor  fellows  in  the 
Zeppelin  because  they  are  driven  toward  death  by  the 
same  evil  forces;  there  are  left  those  among  the  loi- 
terers in  Heartbreak  House  who  are  capable  of  a  purg- 
ing experience  and  a  revolution  of  the  soul.  Thus 
before  the  war  Shaw  hoped  against  hope  that  after  the 
days  of  the  great  upheaval  of  the  world  "the  numskull" 
would  not  win.  The  playlets  of  the  war  itself  are  the 
records  of  his  bitter  disillusion.  He  remembers  that 
Shakespeare  compared  man  to  an  angry  ape,  that  Swift 
rebuked  the  Yahoo  with  the  superior  virtues  of  the 
horse ;  and  he  sees  an  army  that  went  forth  to  "destroy 
the  militarism  of  Zabern"  busy  in  Cologne  "imprison- 


162!  Contemporaries 

ing  every  German  who  does  not  salute  a  British  offi- 
cer"; and  sees  the  victors,  their  swelling  moral  phrases 
unsilenced,  "starving  the  enemies  who  had  thrown 
down  their  arms." 

It  is  not  to  be  expected  that  Heartbreak  House  will 
add  to  its  author's  fame  and  influence  to-day.  The  peo- 
ple who  admired  his  incisive  thinking  and  his  brilliant 
speech  when  both  could  be  safely  taken  as  fire-works 
in  the  void  will  not  easily  forgive  his  rending  the  veils 
of  all  their  protective  delusions.  We  shall  be  told,  we 
are  already  being  told,  with  a  cunning  and  useful 
shirking  of  the  issues,  that  Shaw  is  less  of  a  playwright 
than  ever,  that  these  plays  will  not  "play"  (care  being 
taken  not  to  make  the  experiment),  and  that,  at  best, 
he  is  the  easy  jester  shaking  the  negligible  bells  upon 
his  pointed  cap.  The  truth  is,  of  course,  that  Shaw  is 
a  great  comic  dramatist  who  has,  at  times,  followed 
the  classical  methods  of  comedy  by  confronting  shams 
with  realities,  man's  fraudulent  gestures  with  his  hid- 
den self,  but  who,  at  other  times,  has  invented  the  new 
method  of  presenting  on  the  stage  a  battle  of  those 
naked  ideas  that  struggle  for  mastery  in  the  minds 
of  men.  His  best  plays  quiver  with  dramatic  life  and 
play  superbly  before  audiences  who  have  risen  to  a  per- 
ception of  the  overwhelming  reality  of  their  conflicts. 
To  the  supporters  of  melodrama  and  sentimental  com- 
edy they  are  meaningless. ,  But  what,  in  the  whole 
world  of  art  and  thought,  is  not?    Heartbreak  House 


SKam:  Height  and  Decline  163 

will  not,  it  is  possible,  ultimately  rank  with  Shaw's 
best  work;  it  is  worthy  of  all  that  is  most  memorable 
in  his  mind  and  art. 

II.    Shaw  Among  the  Mystics  ^ 

Bernard  Shaw  is  sixty-five  and  in  despair.  The  mad 
peace  finished  what  the  mad  war  had  begun.  We  still 
live  in  a  state  of  "boyish,  cinema-fed  romanticism"; 
we  are  governed  by  grown-up  children  and  defectives. 
Strongly  and  naturally  the  doubt  arises  "whether  the 
human  animal,  as  he  exists  at  present,  is  capable  of 
solving  the  social  problems  raised  by  his  own  aggrega- 
tion." So  the  human  animal  must  be  changed;  we 
must  transform  the  biological  process  from  a  process 
•to  a  weapon  and  a  tool.  We  must  harness  the  Life 
Force,  the  elan  vital,  to  our  chariots  and  drive  into  a 
city  of  God  which  we  ourselves  have  built.  It  is  sheer 
mysticism;  and  that  Shaw,  like  the  aged  Comte,  has 
become  a  mystic  is  something  like  a  tragic  disaster.  He 
accepts  the  full  position  of  the  mystic  and  glories  in  it. 
"When  a  man  tells  you  that  you  are  a  product  of  Cir- 
cumstantial Selection  solely,  you  cannot  finally  dis- 
prove it.  You  can  only  tell  him  out  of  the  depth  of 
your  inner  consciousness  that  he  is  a  fool  and  a  liar." 
Alas,  that  sort  of  inner  consciousness  has  borne  witness 

1  Back  to  Methuselah.    A  Metabiological  Pentateuch.    By  Ber- 
nard Shaw. 


164  Contemporaries 

to  a  flat  earth  and  a  wheeling  sun,  to  virgin  births  and 
to  transubstantiation,  to  the  special  creation  of  species, 
to  the  righteousness  of  human  slavery  and  war  and 
persecution.  It  is  our  old  friend  faith,  the  evidence  of 
things  unseen.  It  is  beautiful  and  pathetic.  But  it 
has  been  the  source  of  untold  errors  and  miseries  when 
not  strictly  limited  to  the  forever  unseeable.  If  the 
Neo-Darwinians  are  right,  Shaw  exclaims,  "only  fools 
and  rascals  could  bear  to  live."  That  is  what  the  bish- 
ops told  Huxley;  it  is  the  cry  of  every  timid  sentimen- 
talist whose  world  will  not  conform  to  his  vision  of 
what  it  should  be.    And  this  from  Bernard  Shaw! 

He  builds  his  mystical  structure  upon  a  basis  of  ap- 
parently scientific  reasoning.  According  to  the  mod- 
em followers  of  Lamarck,  "organisms  changed  because 
they  wanted  to,"  and  the  chief  factor  in  the  transmu- 
tation of  species  was  use  and  disuse.  According  to  the 
followers  of  Darwin,  the  same  process  is  accounted  for 
by  natural  selection,  that  is,  by  the  propagation  of  a 
species  through  those  individuals  which  are  best  adapted 
to  survive  in  a  given  environment.  Shaw  identifies  the 
use  and  disuse  of  the  Neo-Lamarckians  with  Schopen- 
hauer's Will,  with  his  own  Life  Force,  with  Bergson's 
Uan  vital,  with  the  Holy  Ghost.  He  plays  ducks  and 
drakes  with  the  distinction  between  inherited  and  ac- 
quired biological  characters  and  declares  that  creative 
evolution,  "the  genuinely  scientific  religion,"  means 
literally  that  we  can  shape  the  evolutionary  process  to 


Shaw:  Height  and  Decline  165 

our  liking  as  we  go  along.    The  human  animal  will 
change  when  it  wills  to  change. 

How  should  it  will  to  change?  First  in  the  direction 
of  longevity.  We  die  before  experience  has  ripened 
into  wisdom.  We  do  not  attain  vision  and  so  muddle 
intolerably  the  affairs  of  the  world.  If  we  lived  three 
hundred  years  we  would,  at  least,  transcend  the  lower 
delusions  of  mortality.  What  these  delusions  include 
no  close  student  of  Shaw  can  doubt.  That  magnificent 
intellect  has  always  been  a  little  disembodied.  His  as- 
ceticism is  icy  and  his  fastidiousness  not  quite  human. 
He  regards  sex  as  a  nuisance  and  art  as  a  bauble.  He 
is  offended  not  only  by  disorder  and  dirt;  he  is  offended 
by  the  processes  of  procreation  and  metabolism.  In  a 
word,  he  hates  the  body.  If  he  is  something  of  a  super- 
man in  clarity  and  fire  of  mental  vision,  he  is  also  a 
super-Puritan  in  his  anxiety  to  bum  away  the  world 
and  the  flesh  in  the  flames  of  that  visionary  fire.  The 
three-hundred-year-old  sages  are  not  his  goal.  They 
are  still  born  of  woman  and  nourished  by  the  fruits  of 
the  earth.  Nor  do  the  eerie,  sleepless  Ancients  of  the 
three-hundredth  century  satisfy  him  except  through 
their  ultimate  aspirations.  "But  the  day  will  come 
when  there  will  be  no  people,  only  thought."  On  that 
day  the  goal  will  be  reached — "the  goal  of  redemption 
from  the  flesh  to  the  vortex  freed  from  matter,  to  the 
whirlpool  in  pure  intelligence."  There  is  no  variable- 
ness nor  shadow  of  turning  in  Bernard  Shaw.    Relent- 


1 66  Contemporaries 

lessly  he  follows  the  logic  of  his  own  nature.  It  takes 
him  to  the  "vast  edges  drear  and  naked  shingles  of  the 
world."  But  he  does  not  stop.  He  has  no  eyes  for  the 
green  earth  or  its  poor,  passionate,  struggling  inhab- 
itants. He  whirs  his  iron  wings  and  sets  out  on  his 
lonely  quest  into  the  intense  inane. 

The  five  dramatic  books  of  the  revelation  of  the  new 
vitalist  religion  are  less  brilliant  than  Shaw's  earlier 
works,  less  humanly  sagacious  in  detail,  and,  despite 
several  bravura  passages,  less  eloquent.  But  they  have 
all  his  old  energy  and  rapidity  of  intellectual  move- 
ment and  the  last  two,  The  Tragedy  of  an  Elderly  Gen- 
tleman and  As  Far  as  Thought  Can  Reach,  are 
matchless  exercises  of  a  cold  imaginative  vigor  building 
its  structures  out  into  the  void.  Yet  so  divorced  from 
essential  human  feeling  are  these  stupendous  parables 
and  legends  that  Shaw  never  suspects,  for  instance,  the 
true  character  of  his  Ancients.  He  means  them  to  in- 
spire awe;  they  arouse  pity  and  disgust  like  the  Struld- 
brugs  of  Swift.  Did  he,  by  any  chance,  remember  his 
great  predecessor  and  draw  the  parallel?  Swift,  hav- 
ing castigated  the  follies  and  the  crimes  of  mankind, 
holds  up  as  a  saving  ideal  the  simplest  goodness,  gen- 
tleness, and  innocence  of  soul.  Shaw,  suaver  in  ges- 
ture but  in  reality  more  terrible,  finds  no  hope  in  any 
quality  of  human  nature.  It  must  be  transcended;  it 
must  be  obliterated;  it  must  be  remembered  withjoath- 
ing  and  contempt.    Man  must  return  "to  the  whirlpool 


Shaw:  Height  and  Decline  167 

in  pure  force"  whence  the  world  arose.  Form  itself 
has  become  an  ache  to  Shaw.  He  thirsts  for  nothing- 
ness. He  destroys  the  cosmos  not  like  Faust  with  an 
imprecation,  but  with  an  argument.  In  no  sense  will 
mankind  take  his  bleak  parable  to  heart.  It  is  the 
monument  of  a  great  despair.  But  men  do  not  despair. 
They  are  sustained  by  the  very  things  that  Shawtholds 
to  be  negligible  if  not  noxious — ^by  love  and  art,  food 
and  wine,  and  even  by  a  little  warmth  when,  after  dark- 
ness, the  goodly  sun  retiu-ns. 


The  Quiet  Truth  ^ 

Good  manners  are  commonly  associated  with  a  safe 
disposition;  a  gentleman  with  well-creased  trousers  and 
a  nice  taste  in  cravats  is  not  suspected  of  a  bomb  under 
his  coat.  Comfortable  people  shy  at  the  soap-box  ora- 
tor and  overlook  Bertrand  Russell  in  his  study.  To 
be  considered  dangerous,  a  dramatist  must  have  about 
him  something  of  the  conventionalized  radical.  Few 
things  are  seen  until  they  have  become  myths.  The 
public  that  neither  reads  Shaw  nor  understands  him 
has  a  vague  mental  image  of  a  flaming  beard,  a  sar- 
donic smile,  a  Jaeger  shirt,  and  a  Fenian  meeting.  That 
is  the  real  thing;  it  would  make  the  very  Lusk  Com- 
mittee take  notice.  But  John  Galsworthy?  There  are 
his  well-bred  early  novels;  there  is  his  friendship  with 
Winthrop  Ames.  He  has  lectured  before  the  Drama 
League  here  in  a  faultless  frock-coat.  When  he  was 
not  lecturing  he  was  reserved  to  the  point  of  taciturnity. 
How  admirable  and  how  British!  Promptly  the  crowd 
identifies  him  with  another  m5^h,  the  gentleman,  and 
trusts  and  approves  him. 

If  in  the  privacy  of  his  study  he  is  capable  of  con- 
temptuous irony  (one  rather  doubts  it),  his  temptation 

^  Plays.    Fourth  Series.    By  John  Galsworthy. 

i68 


The  Quiet  Truth  1169 

toward  it  must  be  strong.  The  correctness  of  his  de- 
meanor has  endeared  him  to  broad  and  wealthy  bos- 
oms. And  all  the  while,  in  the  laboratory  of  his  mind, 
with  instruments  of  deadly  delicacy  and  serene  pre- 
cision, he  has  tested  the  political  and  moral  pretensions 
of  mankind  and  found  them  a  blunder  and  a  shame. 
He  has  seen  legal  justice  to  be  a  cruel  farce,  romantic 
love  a  delusion,  rigid  marriage  an  instrument  of  stupid 
torture,  the  crowd's  charity  an  insult,  and  its  windy 
opinions  the  weapons  of  murder  and  disgrace.  But  he 
has  neither  cried  nor  striven  and  rarely  condescended 
to  argue.  He  has  used  a  pair  of  balances — exquisite, 
fragile-looking  things  under  a  crystal  globe — and 
weighed  the  issues  of  life.  And  the  result  of  his  weigh- 
ing is  more  devastating  than  the  rioting  of  an  army 
with  scarlet  flags. 

Yet  he  has  never  forgotten  that  he  is  an  artist.  He 
has  never,  to  use  his  own  words,  set  down  directly 
"those  theories  in  which  he  himself  believes,"  but  has 
let  "the  phenomena  of  life  and  character"  tell  their  own 
story  and  point  their  own  moral.  He  has  not  always 
been  able  to  adhere  perfectly  to  the  logic  and  to  the 
rhythm  of  life.  In  The  Fugitive,  fine  and  right  as  the 
details  are,  there  are  also  artifice  and,  at  the  end,  a 
touch  of  violence.  But  by  virtue  of  the  inner  control 
and  patience  of  his  mind  he  has  been  able  to  follow  the 
rhythm  of  life  oftener  than  any  other  English  drama- 
tist, and  he  has  been  able  to  reproduce  it  more  richly 


1 70  Contemporaries 

by  virtue  of  his  supreme  sensitiveness  to  the  true  qual- 
ity of  human  speech.  The  wit  and  eloquence  of  Shaw 
spring  from  a  different  impulse  and  make  for  a  differ- 
ent goal.  Galsworthy's  dialogue  escapes  the  caging  of 
the  printed  page  at  once.  No  theatre  can  contort  it,  no 
actor  vulgarize  it  with  the  false  graces  of  his  trade. 
For  it  is  thus  that  men  speak  in  the  eagerness  of  affairs 
or  under  the  sting  of  passion. 

Of  the  new  plays  the  first,  A  Bit  of  Love,  is  undeni- 
ably the  weakest.  The  dramaturgic  method  uses  de- 
tails both  of  speech  and  of  character  which,  sound  as 
they  are  in  themselves,  scatter  the  impression  and  dilute 
the  concentration  of  the  central  action.  That  action 
has  power  in  itself,  but  its  conclusion  is  lame.  He  who 
follows  Christ  is  crucified.  The  curate  Strangway  re- 
fuses either  to  hold  or  persecute  his  wife,  who  has  gone 
to  the  man  she  always  really  loved.  The  people  of  the 
parish  rise  up  against  Strangway  as  a  coward  and  a 
pagan.  They  despise  a  man  who  will  not  fight  for  what 
is  his  own.  The  vicar's  wife  has  the  kindest  intentions. 
But  she,  too,  cannot  help  reminding  him  that  the 
Church  "is  based  on  a  rightful  condemnation  of  wrong- 
doing." Strangway  leaves,  praying  for  strength  "to 
love  every  living  thing."  Now  it  is  a  well-nigh  uni- 
versal experience  that  the  passions  of  men  will  not  let 
them  renounce  force  until  they  see  its  pitiful  futility. 
The  curate  shows  no  sense  of  the  plain  fact  that  perse- 
cuting his  wife  would  neither  have  brought  her  back 


The  Quiet  Truth  171 

nor  healed  his  wounds,  and  that  dragging  her  back 
would  only  have  turned  her  remorse  and  compassion 
into  active  hate.  He  renounces  with  vague  emotional 
gestures.  These  are  to  be  approved;  they  are  not  likely 
to  be  imitated.  He  is,  in  brief,  more  saint  than  man. 
The  representation  of  him  as  a  miniature  St.  Francis 
weakens  the  human  validity  of  the  play. 

The  Foundations  is  a  dramatic  picture  of  the  social 
turmoil  of  post-war  England.  Its  mood  is  one  of  rather 
desperate  gaiety.  Things  are  going  to  pieces,  but  it 
is  better  to  understand  and  tolerate  than  to  be  glum 
and  important.  From  a  little  group  of  consummately 
drawn  characters  there  stand  out  Lord  William  Dro- 
mondy,  son  of  a  duke  and  M.  P.,  and  Lemmy,  gas- 
fitter  and  uncompromising  revolutionist.  The  bad  joke 
is  that  these  two — quite  unlike  Anthony  and  Roberts 
in  Strife — are  not  opposed  to  each  other  at  all.  Lord 
William  knows  perfectly  well  that  the  game  is  up.  He 
has  been  through  the  war  and  sees  that  Lemmy's  diag- 
nosis and  accusation  are  alike  unanswerable.  The  cap- 
italist state  asked  labor  to  defend  it  and  then  "soon  as 
ever  there  was  no  dynger  from  outside,  stawted  to  myke 
it  inside  wiv  an  iron  'and."  Lord  William  quite  agrees. 
But  he  is  in  a  minority  among  his  own  class  and  no 
rational  course  of  action  seems  open  to  him  at  all.  He 
holds  a  meeting  to  relieve  the  conditions  of  sweated 
labor,  but  he  is  aware  of  the  fact  that  such  feeble  and 
gentlemanly  tinkering  no  longer  counts.    The  repre- 


172!  Contemporaries 

sentative  of  the  press  sputters  the  old  phrases  for  the 
wage  paid  him  by  a  capitalist  paper,  but  in  his  heart 
he  echoes  the  final  cry  of  the  indomitable  Lemmy: 
"Dahn  wiv  the  country,  dahn  wiv  everyfing!  Begin 
agyne  from  the  foundytions!"  It  is  the  foundations 
that  must  be  rebuilt. 

The  Skin-Game  has  a  more  timeless  touch.  It  takes 
the  tragi-comedy  of  all  human  conflict,  localizes  it  nar- 
rowly, embodies  it  with  the  utmost  concreteness,  and 
yet  exhausts  its  whole  significance.  For  the  staggering 
truth  concerning  all  human  conflict,  whether  between 
groups  of  men  or  individuals,  is  that  each  contestant  is 
both  right  and  wrong;  that  each  has  the  subjective 
conviction  of  being  wholly  right;  that  as  the  conflict 
grows  in  length  and  bitterness  each  is  guilty  of  deeds 
that  blur  his  original  rightness  and  bring  him  closer  to 
the  wrongness  against  which  he  fights;  that  hence  to 
be  victorious  in  any  conflict  is  to  add  your  adversary's 
unrighteousness  to  your  own  and  to  be  defeated  is  to 
gain  the  only  chance  of  saving  your  soul.  "Who  touches 
pitch  shall  be  defiled"  is  the  motto  of  The  Skin-Game. 
The  pitch  that  defiled  the  Hillcrists  and  the  Horn- 
blowers  was  not  in  either  of  them  but  in  the  conflict 
that  arose  between  them.  Galsworthy  has  never  de- 
rived a  dramatic  action  from  deeper  sources  in  the  na- 
ture of  man;  he  has  never  put  forth  a  more  far-reaching 
idea  nor  shown  it  more  adequately  in  terms  of  flesh  and 
blood — the  gentle  Hillcrist  who  has  an  intermittent 


The  Quiet  Truth  fi73 

vision  of  the  truth,  the  too  sturdy  Hornblower  who  has 
none,  the  clear-eyed,  arrowy  Jill,  the  confused  and 
passionate  victim  Chloe.  There  are  far  greater  plays 
in  the  modern  drama — greater  in  emotional  power 
and  imaginative  splendor.  There  is  none  that  illus- 
trates more  exactly  or  searchingly  the  inner  nature, 
stripped  of  the  accretions  of  myth  and  tradition,  of 
the  tragic  process  itself. 


Barrie,  or  The  Silver  Lining 

Contemporary  reviewers  of  the  drama  may  be  divided 
into  three  classes:  those  who  debate  whether  Pinero  or 
Barrie  is  the  greater  playwright;  those  who  are  troubled 
over  the  relative  eminence  of  Barrie  and  Shaw;  those 
to  whom  both  controversies  are  barren  of  content,  as 
hardly  related  to  serious  dramatic  criticism  at  all. 
What  relation,  let  us  see,  has  Barrie  to  serious  drama? 
It  will  be  useful  to  examine  the  fable  of  Mary  Rose, 
a  characteristic  play.  The  Morelands  take  their  little 
daughter,  Mary  Rose,  on  a  trip  to  the  outer  Hebrides. 
Left  for  an  hour  on  a  tiny  island  that  has  an  eerie 
reputation  among  the  Scotch  country-folk,  Mary  Rose 
disappears.  At  the  end  of  thirty  days  she  is  found 
sketching  in  the  very  spot  whence  she  had  vanished. 
There  is  no  gap  in  her  consciousness;  she  thinks  she 
was  left  a  moment  before.  At  times  thereafter  her  mind 
seems  to  reach  out  after  a  lost  memory;  but  since  her 
parents  have  told  her  nothing,  her  development  is  nor- 
mal. At  nineteen  she  is  betrothed  to  a  young  midship- 
man to  whom  the  Morelands  feel  it  their  duty  to  com- 
municate the  strange  adventure  of  Mary  Rose's  child- 
hood. Her  marriage  with  Simon  Blake  is  very  happy, 
and  when  her  little  son  is  four  years  old  she  persuades 

174 


Barrie,  or  The  Silver  Lining  175 

her  husband  to  take  her  on  a  fishing  trip  to  the  Heb- 
ridean  islands,  of  which  her  memories  are  quite  un- 
clouded. On  the  same  fatal  islet  of  her  first  adventure 
she  disappears  again.  This  time  the  years  drag  on. 
Her  wild  young  son  runs  away  to  sea  at  the  age  of 
twelve.  Her  husband  becomes  a  distinguished  naval 
officer,  but  does  not  marry  again.  When  twenty-five 
years  have  passed  and  Simon  Blake  is  visiting  the 
Morelands,  a  Scotch  clergyman  who  was  once  the 
Blakes's  guide  comes  in  and  announces  that  Mary  Rose 
has  reappeared  just  as  she  did  on  that  earlier  occasion. 
She  enters,  young  and  fresh  as  on  the  far  day  of  her 
doom,  and  finds  her  parents  old  and  weary  and  her 
husband  strange  and  gray.  She  asks  for  her  little  son 
and  asks  for  him  in  vain.  At  this  point  the  action  of 
the  play  itself  ends.  The  epilogue  permits  us  darkly  to 
infer  that  she  died  of  the  shock  of  an  estranged  world 
and  her  child's  absence.  For  in  that  epilogue  the  son, 
now  a  grizzled  Australian  veteran  of  the  world  war, 
holds  converse  in  the  deserted  Moreland  house  with 
her  unquiet  ghost,  which  vaguely  intimates  that  on  the 
island  magical  music  lured  her  to  an  abode  of  blessed 
spirits  to  which  she  is  now  fain  to  return. 

It  is  clear  that  Barrie  did  not  mean  this  fable  to  be 
accepted  literally,  and  equally  clear  that  he  was  not 
merely  dramatizing  a  bit  of  folk-lore.  We  must  look 
for  the  idea  about  which  the  action  crystallized.  We 
find  it,  if  anywhere,  at  the  opening  of  the  third  act, 


176  Contemporaries 

immediately  prior  to  the  last  appearance  of  Mary  Rose. 
The  Morelands,  except  for  tremulous  hands  and  white 
hair,  are  exactly  as  they  were  a  quarter  of  a  century 
ago.  They  question  each  other  and  find  that  the  great 
and  strange  tragedy  of  their  lives  has  left  them  essen- 
tially untouched.  After  a  little,  happiness  had  come 
"breaking  through."  Their  daughter's  unheard-of  fate, 
the  loss  of  their  grandson — these  things  are  now  as 
though  they  had  hardly  been  at  all.  Time  heals.  That 
is  not  a  very  notable  idea,  but  in  a  literal  sense  it  is  true 
enough.  Ideas,  however,  have  their  own  spiritual  qual- 
ities, and  the  fact  that  time  undoubtedly  heals  may 
be  regarded  in  different  ways.  There  is  Shelley's  way 
of  regarding  it: 

Alas!  that  all  we  love  of  him  should  be. 
But  for  our  grief,  as  if  it  had  not  been, 
And  grief  itself  be  mortal! 

There  is  the  bitterest  sting,  the  long,  immedicable  woe. 
Forgetfulness  is  the  last  affront  we  offer  the  sacred,  un- 
resisting dead.  Barrie  does  not  think  so.  His  famous 
whimsical  kindliness  comes  in.  Moreland  declares  that 
he  has  spent  his  life  pleasantly  with  pleasant  little 
things;  he  is  not  equal  to  tragedy;  he  doesn't  know 
what  to  do  with  it.  The  return  of  Mary  Rose  makes 
him  horribly  uncomfortable.  He  wants  to  get  back 
to  his  collection  of  prints.  And  Barrie  sheds  the  tough, 
pink  glow  of  his  optimism  on  this  lost  soul.    He  would 


Barrie,  or  The  Silver  Lining  177 

undoubtedly  avert  his  virtuous  face  from  all  human 
errors  due  to  passion,  to  excess,  to  the  generous  vitality 
of  nature.  His  plays  are  commended  for  their  purity. 
He  surrounds  with  his  gentlest  pathos  and  all  the  beauty 
he  can  command  a  triviality  of  soul  that  is  as  shameful 
as  one  hopes  it  rare.  Spiritual  triviality — we  come  very 
close  to  Barrie  with  that  phrase.  He  makes  harsh 
things  sweetish  and  grave  things  frivolous  and  noble 
things  to  seem  of  small  account.  No  wonder  he  is 
popular  among  all  the  shedders  of  easy,  comfortable 
tears.  He  dramatizes  the  cloud  in  order  to  display  its 
silver  lining. 

Mary  Rose  is  as  incoherent  in  its  imaginative  struc- 
ture as  it  is  false  and  feeble  in  idea.  If  the  mysterious 
world  to  which  the  island  gives  access  is  an  abode  of 
the  dead,  why  is  the  living  Mary  Rose  permitted  twice 
to  enter?  If  it  is  not,  why  does  the  same  music  sum- 
mon the  wandering  ghost  that  once  lured  the  living 
girl?  Why  does  she  leave  the  blessed  islands  of  the 
dead  to  haunt  the  decaying  house?  Do  those  islands 
give  neither  forgetfulness  nor  knowledge?  Why  does 
a  distinguished  naval  officer  permit  his  twelve-year-old 
son  gradually  to  disappear  in  Australia?  Would  not 
a  cablegram  have  caused  the  child  to  be  recovered  and 
sent  home?  Must  he  be  lost  only  to  give  the  ghost  of 
Mary  Rose  an  excuse  for  haunting  the  house?  Was 
there  some  special  purpose  in  making  him  so  rough  a 
customer  that  he  converses  with  his  dead  mother  in 


178  Contemporaries 

gutter  slang?  Did  that  circumstance  add  an  extra  luster 
to  the  silver  lining?  Vain  questions.  Barrie's  imagina- 
tion is  as  uncontrolled  as  his  ideas  are  feeble  and  con- 
ventional. Yet  this  is  the  dramatist  whose  position  in 
permanent  literature  is  seriously  debated.  This  pur- 
veyor of  sentimental  comedy  to  the  unthinking  crowd 
deceives  the  semi- judicious  by  moments  of  literary 
charm  and  deftness  and  mellow  grace  that  recall  the 
years  when  he  wrote  Sentimental  Tommie  and  Mar- 
garet Ogilvie.  But  those  years  are  gone.  His  noisy 
stage  successes  have  left  him  increasingly  bare  of  scru- 
ple, of  seriousness,  of  artistic  and  intellectual  coher- 
ence. They  have  left  him  "whimsical"  and  false  and 
defeated  in  the  midst  of  wealth  and  fame. 


Archer,  or  Loaded  Dice 

An  audience  of  extraordinary  distinction  gathered  at 
the  Booth  Theatre  one  night  to  witness  the  first  per- 
formance of  The  Green  Goddess  by  Mr.  William 
Archer.  Academic  powers  and  principalities  displayed 
both  easy  majesty  and  graceful  unbending.  The  lit- 
erary and  editorial  world  had  sent  its  emissaries.  Some 
unsophisticated  youth  aspiring  to  the  honors  of  letters 
and  of  learning  would  have  been  abashed  by  such  a 
blaze  of  glory.  To  one  who  was  neither  young  nor 
unsophisticated  the  splendor  of  the  scene  was  not  un- 
touched by  gloom.  Mr.  Winthrop  Ames,  it  is  true, 
lived  up  to  the  fondest  expectations  of  his  cultured 
friends.  The  scenic  production  was  superb  in  shape 
and  color  and  rich  verisimilitude.  There  were  group 
scenes — barbaric  warriors  with  dark  shields  and  slant- 
ing spears  silhouetted  against  a  burning  sky — that  took 
one's  breath  away;  there  was  a  room  in  the  rajah's 
palace  where  faultless  beauty  spoke  of  malignity  in 
every  detail.  It  is  also  true  that  Mr.  George  Arliss 
gave  a  performance  of  such  pliancy  and  precision  that 
he  seemed  to  flash  and  darken  like  a  polished  blade  in 
alternate  sunshine  and  shadow,  that  Mr.  Ivan  Simpson 
was  of  an  astonishing  raciness  and  truth,  and  that  Mr. 

179 


i8o  Contemporaries 

Cyril  Keightly  and  Miss  Olive  Wyndham  displayed 
their  considerable  talents  to  the  best  advantage.  Nor 
must  one  forget  that,  at  the  appropriate  moment,  Mr. 
Arliss  made  a  curtain  speech  whose  easy  elegance  was 
a  triumph  of  the  art  which  conceals  art,  and  that  the 
distinguished  dramatic  critic  and  translator  of  Ibsen 
followed  him  in  one  that  added  weightiness  to  grace 
and  glow  to  sparkle.  And  yet  that  touch  of  gloom  per- 
sisted. 

For  all  this  pomp  and  circumstance  was  secondary. 
There  was,  after  all,  a  play.  And  the  fable  of  that 
play  is  as  follows:  Two  British  officers  and  a  woman, 
unhappily  wed  to  one,  chastely  adored  by  the  other, 
crash  down  in  their  airplane  over  the  remotest  Hima- 
layas into  the  unknown  principality  of  Rookh.  While 
the  rajah  is  being  summoned,  the  three  sit  in  the  left 
of  the  stage-picture  and  explain  to  each  other  their 
most  guarded  but  common  secrets.  This  is  what  is 
known  as  exposition.  The  rajah  comes  and  offers  them 
a  sophisticated  European  hospitality.  He  has  taken  an 
honors  degree  at  Cambridge  and  is,  on  one  side  of  his 
nature,  a  cynical,  dry-souled  man  of  the  world.  But 
his  deeper  and  ancestral  self  is  at  one  with  his  tribes- 
men of  the  hills.  Three  sons  of  his  father  have  just 
been  condemned  to  death  in  India ;  his  opportunity  for 
revenge  is  at  hand.  Need  one  take  the  trouble  to  add 
that  the  rajah  makes  improper  proposals  to  the  Eng- 
lidi  lady,  that  her  unnecessary  husband  is  shot,  not, 


Archer,  or  Loaded  Dice  i8i 

however,  before  he  has  sent  to  India  a  wireless  call 
for  help,  or  that,  at  the  precise  moment  when  the  lady 
and  the  man  of  her  spotless  affections  are  about  to  be 
tortured  and  sacrificed  to  the  green  goddess,  the  British 
planes  are  heard  metallically  whirring  in  the  air  and 
the  bombs  of  warning  and  liberation  drop?  Needed  one 
to  add  that?  Oak  and  triple  brass  must  have  sur- 
rounded Mr.  Archer's  heart  when  in  the  evening  of  his 
days  he  set  out  to  compete  with  the  early  romances  of 
Rider  Haggard.  Dramatic  critics  need  not  write  plays 
at  all.  Nor  if  they  do,  need  they  write  good  plays. 
But  can  one,  to  take  an  apposite  example,  imagine 
Jules  Lemaitre  writing  not  Le  Pardon  nor  UAge  dif- 
ficile but — La  Femme  X ? 

In  Mr.  Archer's  breast,  however,  as  in  Faust's,  two 
souls  have  always  dwelled.  He  has  done  magnificent 
service  in  introducing  Ibsen  to  the  English-speaking 
public.  He  has  also  written  a  book  called  Play-making 
which  is  widely  used  as  a  text-book  and  contains  a  chap- 
ter called  Chance  and  Coincidence.  Here  he  wrote: 
"The  stage  is  the  realm  of  appearances,  not  of  realities, 
where  paste  jewels  are  at  least  as  effective  as  real  ones." 
If  this  referred  to  a  ballerina's  necklace  it  would  be 
true.  But  it  refers  to  much  more  and  so  becomes  dan- 
gerously untrue.  The  world  itself  is  only  a  world  of 
appearances.  The  drama  seeks  to  interpret  the  spirit- 
ual meaning  of  that  phenomenal  order  by  an  act  of 
heightened  and  condensed  and  clarified  imitation.    It 


182  Contemporaries 

must  be,  in  a  sense,  more  real,  more  packed  with  reality 
than  any  fragment  of  the  sprawling,  shifting  world  of 
appearances;  it  holds  fast  a  concentrated  bit  of  reality 
for  our  contemplation.  It  does  that  or  it  is  nothing. 
And  further  Mr.  Archer  wrote:  "The  playwright  is 
perfectly  justified  in  letting  chance  play  its  probable 
and  even  inevitable  part  in  the  affairs  of  his  charac- 
ters." That  is  very  loose  and  very  inaccurate  thinking. 
For  what  is  a  chance  or  an  accident?  It  is  the  event  of 
a  chain  of  causality  that  our  vision  does  not  embrace. 
Could  we  grasp  the  universe  entire  and  be  privy  to  all 
its  workings,  chance  and  accident  would  disappear. 
They  are  brief  names  for  a  necessary  ignorance.  But 
it  is  the  aim  of  the  dramatist  to  make  life  more  and 
not  less  intelligible.  It  is  his  first  business,  so  far  as 
it  is  humanly  speaking  possible,  to  command  all  the 
chains  of  causality  that  explain  the  events  with  which 
he  deals.  The  wise  Greeks  derived  chance  from  the 
inexorable  will  of  a  fate  to  which  even  the  gods  were 
subject.  They  made  it  part  of  their  universal  order. 
Mr.  Archer  really  means  sudden  intrusion  of  the  un- 
caused. But  the  uncaused  does  not  exist.  The  seri- 
ous modern  dramatist  who  admits  accident  or  chance 
is  not  unlike  a  chemist  who  should  assist  recalcitrant 
nature  to  produce  the  specious  show  of  a  successful 
result  to  an  experiment  by  the  injection  of  substances 
that  negate  the  experiment's  entire  purpose  and  mean- 
ing.   The  artist,  to  be  sure,  is  fallible.    He  works  with 


Archer,  or  Loaded  Dice  183 

treacherous  and  imponderable  materials.  His  severest 
masterpiece  will  seem  to  him  still  not  inevitable  enough. 
He  must  be  content  if,  in  his  innermost  consciousness, 
he  knows  that  it  has  grown  and  has  not  been  made. 
Mr.  Archer  protests  that,  in  spite  of  his  statements,  he 
does  not  like  to  see  the  dice  loaded.  To  admit  chance, 
accident,  or  inexplicable  coincidence  at  all  is  to  load 
the  dramatic  dice  at  the  very  outset.  Once  you  do 
that  you  can  translate  Ibsen  and  write  The  Green  God- 
dess with  equal  cheerfulness.  But  the  grim  old  Norse- 
man among  the  shades  would  understand  the  touch  of 
gloom  that  would  not,  to  two  or  three  people,  lift  from 
the  Booth  Theatre  on  a  certain  night. 


Somerset  Maugham  Himself 

For  several  centuries  the  drama  has  been  the  outcast 
of  English  literature.  Men  thought  it  good  enough  as 
a  source  of  fortune  but  hardly  as  a  source  of  fame.  Its 
supposed  technique  kept  them  from  using  it  as  a  vehi- 
cle of  true  expression;  a  mingled  contempt  and  rever- 
ence for  their  audiences  held  in  check  their  impulses 
toward  veracity  and  power.  The  man  who  wrote  Tom 
Jones  threw  off  nearly  a  score  of  now  forgotten  com- 
edies; the  man  who  wrote  Of  Human  Bondage  is  re- 
sponsible for  as  many.  But  Fielding's  action  was  the 
more  natural.  There  was  not  in  any  vital  sense  an 
expressive  drama  in  the  England  of  his  day.  Nor  could 
he  have  borrowed  fruitfully  from  the  tragedy  of  Vol- 
taire or  the  comedy  of  Marivaux.  Mr.  Maugham  has 
had  the  example  of  Shaw  and  of  Galsworthy  and  of  the 
Germans  among  whom  he  passed  his  student  years. 
Yet  he  has  gone  so  far,  in  the  past,  as  to  write  for  the 
stage  with  a  hard  deliberateness  from  within  the  round 
of  illusions  he  must  himself  despise.  He  sank  as  low  as 
C Cesar's  Wife.  Perhaps  a  late  uneasiness  assailed  him. 
He  heeded  that  warning  and  wrote  The  Circle. 

He  does  not  yet  venture  a  tone  that  fits  his  subject 
and  his  fundamental  mood.    He  lets  the  irony  lighten 

184 


Somerset  Maugham  Himself  185 

and  brighten  and  become  farcical;  he  lingers  and  hesi- 
tates until  one  almost  believes  that  he  is  at  one  with 
the  trivial  Pinero  who  thought  that  Paula  Tanqueray 
was  really  an  object  of  tragic  compassion  because  the 
ladies  of  the  county  would  not  come  to  tea.  Late  in  the 
third  act  the  cleaving  truth  appears.  But  even  here 
Mr.  Maugham  will  not  let  it  be  quite  somber  or  else 
quite  radiant.  He  swathes  it  a  little  with  sentiment 
and  muffles  it  a  little  with  false  memories.  But  it  is 
out.  For  the  first  time  in  the  drama  his  intellectual 
integrity  is  intact. 

Two  subjects  seem  to  haunt  the  mind  of  the  British 
pla5rwright:  the  subject  of  the  socially  unequal  mar- 
riage and  the  subject  of  the  eloping  couple  who  drag 
out  hopeless  lives  because  their  particular  social  group 
will  have  none  of  them.  And  the  tradition  was  that 
the  first  of  these  two  actions  should  end  happily,  as  in 
Robertson's  Caste,  and  that  the  second  should  end 
wretchedly  and  vindicate  the  social  solidarity  of  the 
British  ruling  class.  Galsworthy's  The  Eldest  Son 
shattered  the  first  of  these  traditional  solutions,  Somer- 
set Maugham's  The  Circle  shatters  the  second. 

At  first  the  conventional  tone  seems  to  prevail.  Lord 
Porteous  and  Lady  Kitty  who  ran  away  together  thirty 
years  ago  return.  They  quarrel  and  bicker.  He  gets 
tight  after  dinner  because  he  had  to  give  up  his  politi- 
cal career  and  could  not  go  big  game  shooting  with  his 
equals.    She  is  rouged  and  affected,  old  without  peace 


1 86  Contemporaries 

or  dignity  or  comfort,  because  during  the  thirty  years 
in  Italy  she  had  no  place  or  activity  in  society  and  had 
to  consort  with  kept  women  and  shady  barons.  The 
once  abandoned  husband  circles  about  these  two  with 
an  old  bitterness  sheathed  in  a  bright,  luxurious,  goad- 
ing irony.  But  the  mere  visible  example  of  Porteous 
and  Lady  Kitty  does  not  suffice  to  point  the  moral  of , 
their  fate.  Elizabeth,  Lady  Kitty's  slim  and  fiery  and 
romantic  young  daughter-in-law,  is  just  about  to  bolt 
with  a  young  man  from  the  Malay  Peninsula.  Por- 
teous and  Lady  Kitty  do  a  brave  and  ghastly  thing. 
They  bare  their  history.  Its  boredom,  its  moral  seedi- 
ness,  its  brief  rapture,  and  its  long  regret.  Elizabeth 
is  frightened  and  subdued.  But  her  young  man  makes 
a  final  plea.  He  does  not  offer. her  happiness  but  splen- 
dor and  despair,  not  the  peace  of  the  world  but  the 
sword  of  the  spirit.  She  goes  with  him.  And  as  she 
goes  old  Porteous  rises  to  a  moment  of  self-recognition 
that  saves  the  play,  crushes  a  sentimental  convention 
of  the  stage,  and  vindicates  the  mind  and  art  of  Som- 
erset Maugham.  He  and  Lady  Kitty  have  failed  not 
on  account  of  what  they  did  but  on  account  of  what 
they  were.  "We're  trivial  people,  Kitty,"  he  says  sadly.. 
It  is  the  right  and  momentous  word,  the  word  that 
Pinero  did  not  utter  even  by  implication  in  regard  to 
the  Tanquerays.  People  who  go  to  pieces  morally  and 
mentally  simply  because  the  members  of  one  small  so-^ 
cial  group  cast  them  off  and  who  therefore  herd  with 


Somerset  Maugham  Himself  187 

pinchbeck  imitations  of  that  group  are  trivial  people. 
.A,><rhe  world  is  wide  and  full  of  magnificent  persons"froni 
"^  all  its  ends  who  do  not  ask  after  the  social  register. 
They  whom  the  social  register  can  bend  were  never 
erect  in  any  deeply  human  sense.  It  is.^bajacterthat 
creates  the  quality  of_action.  Not  what  you.  do  mat-. 
ters,  but  what  your  soul  makes  of  the  thing  you  do. 

It  will  be  seen,  then,  that  with  The  Circle  Somerset 
Maugham  at  last  approaches  the  serious  modern  drama 
— the  drama  in  which  conflict  and  solution  are  trans- 
ferred from  the  superficial  compacts  and  modes  of  so- 
cial life  into  that  realm  of  the  reason  and  of  spiritual 
values  in  which  those  modes  and  compacts  are  them- 
selves questionable  and  on  trial.  This  is  indeed  the 
test  of  any  play:  whether  it  accepts  the  rules  of  the 
social  or  political  or  moral  game  as  fixed  and  final  or 
whether  it  goes  to  those  sources  of  truth  in  the  nature 
of  man  and  of  his  world  which  these  rules  often  slan- 
der and  betray.  The  hardest  thing  to  do,  Maugham 
wrote  in  his  great  novel,  is  to  "establish  a  contact  with 
reality."  It  seems  hardest  of  all  through  the  medium 
of  the  drama.  But  in  The  Circle  he  has  established 
that  contact  at  last. 


Max  Reinhardt 

It  is  not  often  that  a  man  retiring  from  public  activity 
at  the  age  of  forty-eight  may  be  said  to  have  changed 
permanently  the  character  of  the  art  which  he  has 
practised.  Yet  to  say  that  of  Max  Reinhardt  is,  in  one 
sense,  to  say  too  little.  It  may  be  justly  urged,  from 
another  point  of  view,  that  he  has  created  a  new  art  or, 
at  the  least,  transformed  a  professional  activity  into  a 
creative  one.  For  the  essence  of  this  man's  work  is 
not  to  be  sought  in  his  revolving  stages,  his  tiny  or 
gigantic  playhouses,  or  even  in  the  unexampled  wealth 
of  great  dramatic  literature  which  he  persuaded  his 
public  to  accept.  His  secret  is  his  inner  and  initial  con- 
ception of  his  task;  his  triumph  is  in  the  lonely  hours 
of  contemplation  before  his  vision  was  transferred  to 
the  theatre. 

What  was  the  character  of  the  vision  that  came  to 
him?  It  was  a  vision  of  the  play's  soul,  of  its  inner- 
most nature  in  terms  of  images  and  sounds.  What 
came  to  him  was  the  play's  intimate  "style,"  its  inner 
music,  its  inevitable  rhythm  of  tone  and  color.  The 
sudden  vision  revealed  to  him  how,  in  this  special  in- 
stance, the  "intensity  of  nature"  could  be  equaled — the 
intensity  of  the  play's  own  interpretation  of  nature,  be 

i88 


Max  Reinhardt  1189 

it  observed.  For  Reinhardt's  imagination  is  synthetic, 
not  analytic.  He  spent  his  apprenticeship  with  Otto 
Brahm,  first  of  the  great  naturalistic  directors.  But  he 
himself  is  a  neo-romantic  through  and  through.  Hence 
his  close  affiliation  with  Hof mannsthal  and  the  younger 
members  of  the  Viennese  school;  hence  in  so  many  of 
his  stage-pictures  the  eerie  grace  and  wild,  haunting 
loveliness  that  allies  him  to  the  spirit  of  Moritz  von 
Schwind  and  the  romantic  painters.  The  vision  that 
came  to  him  was,  in  brief,  one  of  a  special  kind  of 
beauty  answering  a  special  soul  in  art.  So,  brooding 
over  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  it  came  to  him  that 
this  piece  was  a  forest  poem — ^Waldgedicht.  He  saw 
the  forest  in  its  changing  moods;  he  saw  the  creatures 
of  the  play  blend  with  or  detach  themselves  from  the 
trees  and  glades.  He  heard  the  forest  music.  He  saw 
and  created  a  vision  of  the  forest — Shakespeare's  and 
also  his  own.  The  spectators  were  persuaded  to  yield 
imaginatively  to  the  vision  and  this  now  celebrated 
production  was  performed  nearly  a  thousand  times! 
What  the  "sacred  bard"  is  to  the  hero,  Reinhardt  has 
been  to  the  bard  himself. 

Having  seen  his  vision,  he  forced  himself  to  work 
with  all  the  national  passion  for  scholarly  thoroughness 
and  accuracy.  He  read  the  commentators  of  the  poet 
and  the  play,  the  political  history  of  the  play's  period, 
the  history  of  its  manners  and  its  art.  But  his  inten- 
tion was  never  realistic  reproduction,  never  a  cold  his- 


190  Contemporaries 

toricity;  he  sought  the  symbolical  detail  that  blended 
with  and  interpreted  his  original  vision.  Thus  in  work- 
ing at  his  production  of  Othello  he  found  that  the 
rh3rthni  of  color  which  his  imaginative  grasp  of  the 
Venice  of  1500  had  awakened  in  him  was  almost  ex- 
actly identical  with  that  employed  by  Carpaccio.  And 
so  the  whole  play  was  embodied  through  a  restricted 
scale  of  tints:  leaf-green,  yellowish  white,  gray,  brown, 
brick-red.  But  in  the  scenes  at  Cyprus  line  and  color, 
within  the  framework  of  his  own  vision  and  Carpaccio's 
testimony,  were  given  an  added  sweep  and  a  touch  of 
sultriness.  For  here,  in  spite  of  the  Venetian  domina- 
tion, the  Orient  began  to  glow  and  throb. 

Such  details  and  a  thousand  others  Reinhardt  re- 
corded in  a  document  known  as  his  Regiebuch.  It  con- 
tained the  text  of  the  play  and  a  paraphrase  of  that 
text  giving  the  most  exhaustive  directions  for  the  phys- 
ical cmlDodiment  of  his  vision.  Not  until  this  document 
was  completed  did  he  call  his  assistants  into  confer- 
ence; not  until  his  creative  work  was  done  did  he  enter 
his  workshops  or  his  theatres.  And  often,  after  many 
weeks  of  labor,  he  would  reject  an  entire  production  at 
its  final  rehearsal.  The  vision  had  been  lost;  the 
rh5^hm  was  somehow  broken;  the  special  beauty  he 
had  dreamed  had  not  been  bom.  In  that  spirit  and  in 
no  other  does  art  come  into  being.  The  perfect  and 
permanent  things  are  difficult  and  rare.    No  wonder 


Max  Reinhardt  1 91 

that  it  took  this  man  less  than  twenty  years  to  revolu- 
tionize the  theatre  of  his  country. 

His  concrete  creation  of  the  beauty  through  which 
he  sought  to  equal  the  intensity  of  nature  in  terms  of 
mood  and  light  and  line  and  color  may  be  studied  in 
some  of  his  stage-pictures.  Take  the  scene  of  the  ban- 
quet in  Macbeth.  Every  line  is  a  straight  line,  every 
angle  a  right  angle.  All  form  is  reduced  to  a  barbaric 
severity.  But  the  two  rectangular  windows  in  the  back- 
ground through  which  the  cold  Northern  stars  glitter 
are  narrow  and  tall — so  unimaginably  tall  that  they 
seem  to  touch  that  sky  of  doom.  The  torches  turn  the 
rough  brown  of  the  primitive  wooden  walls  to  a  tar- 
nished bronze.  Only  on  the  rude  tables  lie  splashes  of 
menacing  yellow.  There  is  something  barren  and  gigan- 
tic about  the  scene — a  sinister  quiet;  a  dull  presage. 
Contrast  with  this  the  desolate  modernity,  the  spiritual 
malady  expressed  in  the  upper  chamber  in  John  Ga- 
briel Borkman,  or  the  splendor  and  gay  yet  pain- 
touched  passion  in  Much  Ado  About  Nothing,  or  the 
earnest  charm  and  cool,  autumnal  grace  of  The  Mar- 
riage of  Figaro.  These  scenes  have  body.  But  that 
body  is  irradiated  by  a  spiritual  life.  And  that  life 
expresses  the  creative  vision  of  Max  Reinhardt. 


iv; 

Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 


A  Certain  Playwright 

Emerging  from  the  lower  East  Side,  he  made  his  first 
appearance  on  the  campus  of  a  well-known  university. 
The  emaciated  little  figure  in  rough,  baggy  clothes 
seemed  even  then  but  a  passing  accident  that  would 
soon  yield  to  the  natural  breadth  and  sturdiness  befit- 
ting a  mind  so  vigorous  and  resolute.  In  a  flat  almost 
unmodeled  face  one  saw,  first  and  last,  the  small,  dark, 
indomitable  eyes  that  could  melt  into  kindliness  or 
harden  into  a  militant  shrewdness.  There  was  not  a 
shred  of  affectation  about  him  and  the  lock  of  hair  that 
slanted  across  his  forehead  marked  him  as  an  intellec- 
tual. He  meant  to  write  plays — plays  that  would  get 
on.  He  had  already  contacts  of  some  sort  with  casual 
purveyors  of  vaudeville  material  and  he  let  you  know 
with  a  grim  and  almost  contemptuous  good  humor  that 
your  pleasant  idealisms  would  get  you  exactly  nowhere. 
He  studied  the  great  dramatists  of  several  literatures. 
He  had  both  the  mind  and  the  humanity  to  understand 
their  virtues.  But  these,  he  informed  you,  were  remote 
and  impossible.  A  teacher  of  deep  personal  strength, 
drenched  in  the  stream  of  reality,  unattenuated  by  aca- 
demic repression  and  refinement,  might  have  stirred 
him.    He  met  none  such  and  listened  with  mild  ap- 

195 


196  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

proval  to  the  blithe,  learned,  and  immensely  accom- 
plished gentleman  whose  notions,  despite  a  flourishing 
of  great  names  and  works,  were  at  bottom  identical 
with  his  own.  It  is  at  this  point  that  his  story  begins 
to  broaden  in  meaning.  The  university  taught  him 
many  things,  but  it  produced  in  him  no  inner  change. 
It  had,  in  no  deep  sense,  held  him,  and  he  turned — you 
could  almost  see  the  doggedness  of  his  attack — to  crash 
through  the  obstacles  that  arose  between  himself  and 
Broadway.  He  disappeared  from  view  into  a  half- 
murky,  half-garish  world  of  vaudeville  sketches  and  of 
small  collaborations  with  tinseled  semi-celebrities  of 
the  stage.  According  to  his  own  notion  he  was  mas- 
tering his  chosen  craft. 

He  mastered  it.  He  crushed  the  obstacles.  But  it 
took  him  fourteen  years.  Of  those  years  no  direct 
knowledge  is  available.  But  our  friend's  deliberately 
direct  gestures  both  of  mind  and  body  had  never  quite 
concealed  a  lurking  sensitiveness  of  the  spirit.  Per- 
haps he  attempted  to  write  more  truly  and  nobly  than 
his  theories  warranted,  and  indeed  got  nowhere;  per- 
haps such  experiences  caused  him  to  harden  both  his 
temper  and  his  methods  the  more  rigorously.  One  can 
easily  divine  moments  of  half-success  and  moments  of 
empty  despair.  Both  were  but  spurs  to  his  tireless 
energy.  Suddenly,  from  any  public  point  of  view — ^at 
last,  of  course,  from  his  own — he  burst  with  quite  un- 
paralleled resoundingness  upon  the  living  stage.    At 


A  Certain  Playwright  197 

the  end  of  a  single  season  he  had  three  popular  suc- 
cesses of  the  first  order  to  his  credit.  The  houses  were 
thronged,  road  companies  started  West  and  South;  a 
golden  flood  poured  in  on  him.  He  was  to  be  seen 
everywhere.  Managers,  actors,  fellow  playwrights 
treated  him  with  a  caressing  familiarity.  You  could 
see  him  in  a  box  at  first  nights,  now  broad  and  stocky 
and  more  than  ever  full  of  strength  and  tenacity.  But 
the  flat  face  was  lined  and  almost  scarred  here  and 
there,  and  the  clever,  kindly  eyes  passed  from  satis- 
faction to  melancholy.  For,  strange  to  say,  the  critics 
held  out  against  him,  and  he,  a  man  of  scholarly  train- 
ing and  hidden  sensitiveness,  shivered  amid  the  heat 
of  his  success.  He  wanted  them  on  his  side.  Were 
they  not  always  ready  to  praise  work  upon  no  higher 
plane  than  his  own?  He  was,  to  be  sure,  writing  down 
to  the  taste  of  the  largest  and  least  discriminating  pub- 
lic. But  so  was  everybody  else.  Only  he  did  it  more 
effectively,  with  a  hard,  merciless,  almost  brutal  knowl- 
edge of  human  weakness  and  fatuity.  The  public  wept 
at  his  first  piece,  were  thrilled  by  his  second,  laughed 
with  him  at  his  third.  He  had  conquered  the  stage  of 
his  own  day  and  country,  as  his  old  teacher  had  bidden 
him  to  do;  he  did  well  what  everybody  else  was  trying 
to  do  and  usually  did  ill.  But  the  critics  jeered.  Per- 
haps they  were  irritated  by  the  very  assurance  of  the 
steely  cleverness  with  which,  especially  in  his  third 
piece,  he  played  upon  the  showy  hypocrisy  and  hidden 


198  ^rt,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

wantonness  of  his  wretched  audiences;  perhaps  they 
rebelled  against  the  too  terribly  calculated  succession 
of  falsely  tense  moments  in  his  second.  The  fact  re- 
mains. And,  as  that  first  magnificent  season  of  his 
progressed,  he  grew  somber  over  the  situation  in  which 
he  found  himself — successful  by  all  the  avowed  stand- 
ards of  his  profession  and  yet  denied  any  ultimate  rec- 
ognition besides  his  profits — and  once,  at  least,  broke 
out  in  irritation  and  anger. 

How  deeply  he  felt  that  situation  soon  became  clear. 
The  first  play  of  his  second  season  told  his  own  story 
and  symbolized  his  own  defense.  A  group  of  college 
seniors  meet  on  graduation  night  and  discuss  their  fu- 
ture. Their  confidence  in  themselves  and  in  each  other 
is  boundless.  By  common  consent  one  among  them, 
the  poet  and  idealist,  is  doomed  always  to  fail  and  to 
depend  upon  his  friends  for  his  worldly  welfare.  At 
the  end  of  three  years  they  meet  and,  as  it  is  easy  to 
suspect,  the  soaring  hopes  have  all  gone  under  and  the 
friends  have  only  humiliating  confessions  to  make.  At 
the  last  moment  the  poet  comes  in.  He  alone  has  con- 
quered the  world;  he  alone  is  rich.  He  has  not  written 
poetry,  to  be  sure.  He  is,  indeed,  a  garbage  king.  But 
he  alone,  to  whom  material  things  meant  least,  has 
beaten  the  world  at  its  own  vile  game.  He,  too,  it  be- 
comes clear  as  the  play  goes  on,  has  not  only  conquered 
circumstances,  but,  secure  in  the  riches  of  his  own 
mind,  has  the  magnanimity  to  cast  the  wealth  aside. 


A  Certain  Playwright  199 

The  pla)^  failed.  No  critic  saw  the  personal  meaning 
or  the  pathos  of  the  fable.  None  suspected  an  apo- 
logue. Nor  were  the  critics  to  be  blamed.  For  the 
idea  of  the  play  had  no  embodiment  that  was  worthy 
of  it.  Our  friend  had  learned  no  new  methods  in  a 
single  summer  by  which  to  project  dramatically  the 
realities  of  his  own  soul.  Characters,  incident,  mechan- 
ism were  of  the  old  insufferable  hoUowness  and  arti- 
fice. Only  the  cold  dexterity,  the  unscrupulous  theatri- 
cal skill — these  were  lacking.  The  man,  laying  bare 
his  heart,  had  ruined  the  pla3rwright. 

On  the  second  night  of  the  play's  brief  run  he  stood 
in  the  vestibule  of  the  theatre,  gesticulating  with  his 
short,  thick  arms.  The  reviews  that  morning  had  been 
contemptuous  to  the  point  of  ferocity.  "Did  you  see 
the  papers?"  he  cried.  "What's  the  use  of  writing  hon- 
estly, of  giving  them  good  stuff?  What's  the  use?" 
The  ushers  were  putting  out  the  lights  in  the  theatre, 
the  audience  had  melted  away,  even  the  vestibule  grew 
dim.  He  continued  to  stand  in  the  shadow,  expostu- 
lating with  vigor,  with  characteristic  tenacity,  yet  with 
a  strange  and  almost  boyish  helplessness  of  appeal. 
What  was  one  to  tell  him?  That  his  whole  art  must 
be  bom  again?  That  he  must  forget  all  he  had  slowly 
learned,  all  his  own  resolves?  That  he  must  return  to 
early  memories  or  purely  human  impressions  and  write 
as  simply  as  though  he  had  never  known  a  theatre? 
That  collaboration,  despite  misleading  examples  in 


200  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

another  age,  is  the  death  of  true  art,  which  must  arise, 
like  prayer,  from  the  lonely  chambers  of  the  soul? 
That  his  powerful  intelligence,  his  generous  gifts,  his 
wide  knowledge  would  avail  him  nothing  without  a 
shifting  of  his  whole  vision  of  man  and  life  and  art? 
He  turned  at  last  to  go,  thrusting  his  broad  shoulders 
forward  with  a  movement  half  of  disgust,  half  of  deter- 
mination. His  whole  body,  in  its  vigorous  expressive- 
ness, seemed  to  say  that  never  had  the  futile  absurdity 
of  his  inmost  self  with  its  sounder  impulses  become 
more  clear.  He  walked  up  the  dark  alley  beside  the 
theatre  on  his  way  to  the  players'  rooms  and  disap- 
peared. He  will  pass,  in  all  likelihood,  from  one  loud 
success  to  another  and,  amid  the  plaudits  of  the  crowd 
and  the  wealth  of  the  years,  hide  ever  more  guardedly 
the  und5dng  ache  in  his  own  soul. 


Within  Our  Gates 

Let  us  suppose  that,  among  the  many  thousands  of 
visitors  who  throng  New  York  during  the  fall  and 
winter  months,  there  were  also  to  be  found  one  of  those 
forlorn  children  of  light  whom  Matthew  Arnold  was 
fond  of  mentioning.  It  might  even  be  some  college 
professor  from  the  West  or  the  Middle  West.  Such 
things  have  been  known.  He  has  probably  taught 
through  a  long  winter  and  also,  in  order  to  save  a  little 
money,  through  a  dusty  summer.  He  has  lectured  on 
the  drama,  its  development  and  technique,  but  has  seen 
nothing  for  many,  many  months  except  Mary  Pickford 
on  the  screen  and  once  Mr.  Robert  Mantelf  as  Mac- 
beth. And  now  the  air  of  Broadway  tingles  on  his  face 
and  his  great  moment  has  come.  He  is  here  to  draw 
inner  sustenance  for  another  two  or  three  years.  And 
luckily — oh,  yes,  such  things  happen  too — he  has  mon- 
eyed friends  here  to  whom  theatre  tickets  (war-tax  and 
all)  are  unconsidered  trifles.  His  host  is  down-town  on 
business.  But  his  hostess  is  admirably  present  and 
S5mipathetic.  Of  course,  he  must  see  the  new  plays! 
She  quietly  observes  him,  poor  dear,  with  his  blending 
of  a  becoming  gravity  and  a  bo5ash  eagerness.  She 
decides  against  box-seats  and  first  nights.    He  hasn't 

201 


202  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

probably — again,  poor  dear! — the  proper  clothes.  She 
scans  the  paper.  The  sunlight  falls  on  the  permanent 
Marcelle  waves  of  her  hair.  The  Professor,  once  her 
classmate,  decides  that  the  art  and  air  of  the  metrop- 
olis make  for  youth.  She  must  be  quite  .  .  .  The 
hostess  interrupts  his  reflections.  "Marjorie  Rambeau 
is  at  the  Maxine  Elliott  in  a  new  play.  How  lucky! 
She's  perfectly  wonderful.  And  they  say  that  Wed- 
ding Bells  at  the  Harris  is  quite  adorable.  Such  a 
good  cast,  too.  And  of  course  you're  not  to  miss  The 
Son-Daughter,  Mr.  Belasco's  new  production.  Most 
artistic,  you  may  be  sure.  You'll  love  it!"  Already  a 
little  shadow  creeps  into  the  Professor's  mind.  She 
mentions  no  authors.  By  whom  are  these  plays?  But 
he  is  shy,  and  his  two  glittering  weeks  are  all  before 
him,  and  he  determines  to  let  her  be  his  guide. 

He  couldn't,  somehow,  share  his  friend's  exuberant 
enthusiasm  for  Miss  Rambeau.  He  admitted  that  the 
play.  The  Unknown  Woman,  put  together  by  three 
people  of  whom  he  had  never  heard,  was  preposterous. 
He  told  his  hostess  that  it  was  kept  going  only  through 
a  voluntary  suspension  of  common  sense  on  the  part 
of  both  characters  and  audience.  Nevertheless,  he 
could  not  help  feeling  that  Miss  Rambeau's  intensity 
need  not  have  had  that  edge  of  roughness.  There  was 
a  twang  in  it,  as  of  a  brazen  string.  He  honestly 
thought  the  part  of  the  fat  ward-heeler  the  best  taken 
in  the  play,  and  his  hostess  concluded  that  learned  peo- 


Within  Our  Gates  203 

pie  have  their  own  crudities.  The  surface  of  her  bril- 
liant eagerness  to  amuse  him  was  slightly  dimmed. 

The  Professor  did  enjoy  Wedding  Bells.  Again,  al- 
though he  thought  he  knew  the  history  of  the  recent 
drama  moderately  well,  the  name  of  the  author  had 
no  associations  for  him.  And  again  the  fable  of  the 
play  was  silly  beyond  belief.  But  he  yielded  himself 
gladly  to  the  verve  and  sprightliness  and  obvious  intel- 
ligence of  the  acting.  It  was  not  hidden  from  him  that 
Wallace  Eddinger's  mannerisms  were  merely  stereo- 
t)T3ed  mannerisms  carried  from  play  to  play.  But  to 
him  they  were  not  stale.  And  he  was  delighted  by 
Miss  Margaret  Lawrence's  suave  brightness  and  intel- 
lectual grace  and  by  the  full,  rich  flavor — like  that  of 
good  ale — of  John  Harwood's  performance.  His  host- 
ess was  perceptibly  cheered,  and  at  once  ordered  mag- 
nificent seats  for  the  next  night  at  the  Belasco  Theatre. 
She  anticipated  a  wonderful  moment. 

The  solemn' splendor  of  the  playhouse's  interior  at- 
tuned the  innocent  Professor  to  a  mood  of  lofty  ex- 
pectation. He  was  thrilled  by  the  lovely  sound  of  the 
bell  that  signaled  the  rising  of  the  curtain.  But  he 
gazed  and  listened  with  a  growing  astonishment  and 
finally  with  a  sardonic  smile.  Tucked  in  his  hostess's 
car  he  spoke,  poor  man,  with  that  touch  of  the  didactic 
which  polite  people  deplore  in  his  kind,  and  with  a 
virility  of  diction,  that  would  come  out  whenever  he 
was  at  a  safe  distance  from  his  dean  and  his  president: 


204  '^^^f  Life  and  the  Theatre 

"To  smother  such  inhuman  and  debased  drivel  in  Chi- 
nese objects  of  art  that  are  worth  a  fortune  is  the  last 
insult  to  the  art  of  the  theatre  and  the  public  intelli- 
gence. It's  literally  trying  to  make  a  silk  purse  out  of 
a "  His  hostess  interrupted  him  with  infinite  deli- 
cacy and  skill  and  made  a  mental  reckoning  of  the  num- 
ber of  days  her  friend  had  still  to  be  entertained. 

But  she  was  really  as  heroic  as  she  was  kind.  She 
made  appropriate  inquiries  and  took  the  Professor  to 
the  haunts  of  a  supposedly  more  authentic  art.  He 
followed  her  gladly,  though  now  with  an  inner  wari- 
ness. He  saw  Lennox  Robinson's  The  Lost  Leader  at 
the  Greenwich  Village  Theatre,  and  sorrowfully  recog- 
nized a  noble  intention  unsupported  by  either  dramatic 
or  intellectual  power,  so  that  the  play  trailed  off  into 
a  babble  of  empty  verbiage.  He  wondered  how  so 
clever  a  man  as  Frank  Conroy  could  have  been  taken 
in  by  so  sterile  and  ineffectual  a  play.  He  was  frankly 
amused  by  the  amateurs  who  spouted  the  sociological 
platitudes  of  yesteryear  at  the  delightfully  built  little 
Bramhall  Playhouse.  Nor  was  he  unaware  of  the 
pathos  of  the  discrepancy  between  its  manager's  aspi- 
rations and  abilities.  He  went  to  MacDougal  Street 
and  saw  the  Provincetown  Players  (of  whose  former 
seasons  he  had  heard  good  reports)  indulge  in  banali- 
ties no  less  annoying  for  their  frenzied  queemess,  and 
found  confirmation  of  his  old  adage  that  freedom  in  the 
life  of  art  and  of  the  intellect  is  unattainable  by  febrile 


Within  Our  Gates  205 

temperaments  without  either  knowledge  or  power.  He 
went  to  the  opening  bill  of  the  Theatre  Parisien  at  the 
Belmont  Theatre  and  saw  a  hard,  chill,  shallow  little 
comedy  of  amorous  intrigue  performed  with  unmistak- 
able skill,  but  in  an  almost  archaic  tradition  of  the  art 
of  acting.  He  also  heard  there  a  little  opera  bouffe 
charmingly  sung.  And  he  enjoyed  one  melody  by 
Claude  Terrasse  so  much  that,  with  his  incurable  touch 
of  rusticity,  he  hummed  it  on  the  way  to  his  hostess's 
house. 

That  lady  felt  both  righteous  and  relieved  on  the  day 
of  her  friend's  departure.  She  was  far  too  busy  to  re- 
flect, but  he  gave  her  an  uneasy  sense  of  his  intellectual 
remoteness.  She  was  too  clever  not  to  have  been  able 
to  follow  the  paths  of  his  thinking,  but  she  was  far  too 
comfortable  in  her  present  mental  condition  to  attempt 
it.  The  Professor,  vastly  stimulated  by  his  experiences 
despite  his  obvious  disappointments,  mulled  over  on  his 
westward-speeding  train  the  outline  of  a  lecture  which 
his  local  Drama  League  Center  would  find  immensely 
acceptable  later  in  the  winter.  Certain  sentences  formed 
themselves  in  his  mind  with  a  rare  inevitableness  and 
ease:  "Great  wealth  is  being  expended  on  our  American 
theatre,  and  there  is  no  dearth  of  admirable  talent 
among  our  actors  and  our  craftsmen  of  the  stage.  But 
all  this  wealth  and  talent  are  left  wholly  sterile  through 
the  lack  of  a  directing  intelligence.  The  managers  are 
commercial  opportunists  who  have  not  yet  attained  the 


2o6  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

ordinary  business  man's  instinct  to  employ  experts. 
They  are  advised  by  'cheap'  people  to  do  'cheap'  things 
that  are  supposed  to  be  unfailingly  successful  and  are, 
in  fact,  the  wildest  gambles.  Good  plays,  selected  by 
sound  judges,  would  probably  average  quite  as  high  a 
number  of  commercial  successes  as  the  pieces  now  pro- 
duced. Hence  the  central  problem  is  assuredly  this: 
to  make  the  managerial  mind  more  accessible  to  the 
influence  of  the  best  available  knowledge  and  judgment 
in  its  own  field.  ..."  Whether,  for  one  wild  and  half- 
waggish  moment,  the  Professor  had  a  vision  of  himself 
lifted  out  of  his  poverty  and  appointed  dramaturgic 
director  of  some  metropolitan  manager  at  a  fabulous 
salary,  history  does  not  record. 


Play-Making 

At  a  Broadway  opening  one  night  the  play-bill  in- 
structed the  audience  that  the  new  drama  to  be  pre- 
sented was  "by  Margaret  Lane  and  Howard  Jack." 
These  names  at  least  serve  to  veil  the  crude  facts,  pre- 
serve the  moral,  and  guard  the  proprieties.  Below  was 
the  further  information,  subdued  by  smaller  type  and 
a  pair  of  parentheses,  that  the  work  of  these  authors 
was  "based  on  a  play  by  Milton  Davis."  It  was  no 
masterpiece.  It  has  already  gone  the  way  of  many  of 
these  noisy  concoctions.  But  a  clever  actress  played 
the  chief  part,  and  the  first  night  audience  glowed  and 
applauded,  and  there  was  a  flutter  of  enthusiastic  visit- 
ing in  the  stalls  and  boxes.  Indiscriminate  and  slightly 
illiterate  adjectives  hummed  in  the  air.  At  the  appro- 
priate moment  there  was  a  loud  and  persistent  call  for 
the  author.  Needless  to  say  that  these  play-makers 
and  press  agents,  costumers  and  actresses  out  of  work, 
friends,  "fans,"  and  scene  painters  had  no  desire  to 
rouse  Mr.  Milton  Davis,  who  was,  after  all,  the  "onlie 
begetter"  of  the  evening's  masterpiece,  out  of  his  de- 
cent obscurity.  Nor  was  their  applause  more  than  per- 
functory when  Miss  Margaret  Lane,  a  stout,  scared 
lady,  blinked  for  a  forlorn  moment  across  the  footlights. 
It  was  the  great  Mr.  Howard  Jack  whom  the  audience 
desired  to  see.    He  came — large,  lustrous,  easy,  com- 

207 


2o8  Art,  Life  and  iHe  Theatre 

manding.  He  leaned  on  a  polished  cane  and  his  top- 
hat  flashed.  Diamonds  twinkled  from  his  studs  and 
waistcoat  buttons.  A  large-boned,  pink,  crudely  im- 
pressive man,  radiating  success,  monarch  of  the  scene 
he  surveyed.  He  made  the  desired  curtain  speech.  He 
explained,  not  without  wit  and  adroitness,  that  more 
and  more  as  time  went  on  he  had  to  neglect  his  own 
work  and  act  the  part  of  a  "play  surgeon."  Managers 
had  promising  "scripts" — as  had  been  the  case  here — 
but  the  plays  were  not  in  shape  to  please  the  public. 
Then  he  was  called  in  to  cut,  re-write,  and  stage.  It 
was  a  humble  office  but  a  necessary  one.  At  last  he 
had  found  a  name  for  it.  A  tumult  of  respect  and  af- 
fection followed  him  into  the  wings.  In  how  many 
bosoms  glowed  the  hope  that  some  day  a  shy  little 
manuscript  now  hidden  in  some  managerial  safe  would 
attract  the  lordly  eye  of  Mr.  Jack  and  become  a  roar- 
ing Broadway  hit!  How  many  brown  and  blond  and 
black  little  heads  thought  of  the  many  plays  full  of  the 
"cutest"  parts  which  it  was  the  great  man's  privilege  to 
cast!  Why  should  they  not  applaud  him?  It  was  a 
touching  scene. 

Mr.  Howard  Jack  is  not  the  only  unerring  judge  of 
the  public  heart.  There  are  others  who  infuse  "pep," 
"punch,"  and  patriotism  into  the  plays  on  which  they 
operate.  And  sometimes  these  processes  have  a  history 
which  is  not  nearly  so  gay  as  the  result.  We  do  not 
know,  for  that  matter,  the  feelings  of  the  shadowy 


Play -Making  209 

Milton  Davis.  We  happen  to  know,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  inner  and  most  instructive  history  of  another  case. 
About  five  years  ago  a  young  playwright,  lacking 
neither  talent,  mind,  nor  character,  hit  upon  an  ingen- 
ious technical  device  and  a  popular  fable.  His  play 
was  very  successful.  The  managers  asked  for  more. 
But  our  friend  had  other  notions  concerning  his  art.  A 
melodrama  was  well  enough.  You  made  a  little  money 
with  it  in  order  to  devote  yourself  to  your  true  busi- 
ness. He  wrote,  to  use  his  own  words,  "fantasy,  naked 
tragedy,  satiric  comedy,  psychological  drama."  The 
managers  would  have  none  of  it.  They  demanded 
another  Day  in  Court.  One  cannot  live  on  the  royal- 
ties of  a  single  play  forever.  The  young  playwright 
wrote  another  ingenious  melodrama.  But  he  saw  no 
reason  why  even  into  such  a  play  one  might  not  weave 
a  little  truth,  some  threads  of  intellectual  honesty.  In 
the  center  of  his  action  he  therefore  placed  an  artist 
who,  in  a  lurid  enough  way,  does  symbolize  an  eternal 
human  conflict.  The  rest  was  stage  carpentry.  But 
our  playwright  had  sacrificed  briefly  to  his  true  gods. 
A  great  authority,  a  greater  than  Mr.  Jack — the  pundit 
of  pundits — refused  the  play.  The  artist,  he  said 
curtly,  "would  get  a  laugh."  A  somewhat  less  magnifi- 
cent personage  condescended  to  explain.  "No  artist  is 
ever  taken  seriously  by  an  audience."  Hence  the  man 
in  the  stalls  "has  no  interest  in  seeing  him  killed." 
And  since  the  melodrama  is  a  mimic  man-hunt,  to 


2IO  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

arouse  such  an  interest  is  to  win  one's  battle.  At 
this  point  the  play  surgeons  entered  the  game.  Their 
task  was  to  dehumanize  the  author's  protagonist  and 
to  reduce  the  whole  play  to  a  consistently  melo- 
dramatic level.  One  suggested  turning  the  artist 
into  a  licentious  club  man.  The  author  refused.  A 
lady  surgeon,  herself  a  writer  who  ought  to  be 
above  such  things,  advised  making  him  a  psycho- 
analyst. Then  the  "star"  took  a  hand.  He  had  been 
selected  to  play,  not,  of  course,  the  now  plainly  wicked 
artist-clubman-doctor,  but  the  righteous  district  attor- 
ney who  brings  the  rogue  to  justice  and  marries  the 
heroine.  This  gentleman  declared  that  the  doctor  was 
still  "far  too  human."  He  might  "steal  the  play  from 
the  star ! "  Preliminary  performances,  held  on  the  road, 
turned  the  poor  artist  of  the  original  play  not  only  into 
a- knave,  but  into  a  "nigger."  The  star,  furthermore, 
interpolated  for  himself  a  number  of  burly  and  senti- 
mental and  patriotic  lines  which  he  copyrighted  in  his 
own  name.  To  the  dismayed  author  hurrying  across 
the  continent  to  save  some  rag  of  his  artistic  decency, 
a  flat  ultimatum  was  presented.  The  play  is  a  success. 
The  villain  is  killed  every  night  to  the  glee  of  the  stalls. 
The  author's  name  shimmers  in  electric  lights.  He  is 
making  money;  he  is  envied.  His  real  work  lies  in  his 
desk.  The  play  surgeons  will  continue  to  share  his 
earnings.  For  he  will  try  again  to  write  not  quite  as 
badly  as  one  can.    But  he  must  live. 


Play -Making  2ii 

There  are  tailor-made  plays.  A  popular  star  cannot 
find  a  medium  for  his  art.  That  statement  which  one 
hears  so  often  is,  if  literally  accepted,  sheer  nonsense. 
What  the  star  means  is  that  there  exists,  naturally 
enough,  no  play  in  the  world  in  which  he  can  exploit 
his  personal  mannerisms  and  favorite  tricks  in  the  cen- 
ter of  the  stage  throughout  an  evening.  The  masters, 
alas,  did  not  foresee  him.  In  reality  he  does  not  want 
to  act,  but,  like  Tom  Sawyer,  to  show  off.  Hence  he 
himself  or  his  sister  or  hii  wife  writes  a  dramatic  enter- 
tainment about  him  in  his  most  successful  and  fetching 
poses.  But  the  manuscript  has  not  yet  the  requisite 
theatrical  "pep"  and  "punch."  Enter  the  play  surgeon 
as  co-author. 

There  are  ghost  plays.  A  young  author  has  a  manu- 
script. One  of  the  great  play  surgeons  sees  possibili- 
ties in  it.  A  contract  is  drawn  up  according  to  which 
the  surgeon  has  the  right  to  make  any  and  all  changes 
he  sees  fit.  The  surgeon  also  figures  as  chief  author 
and  receives,  contractually,  two-thirds  of  all  royalties. 
The  young  author,  who  is  something  of  an  artist,  is 
ashamed  of  his  bargain.  But  he  must  live.  Such  is 
the  art  of  play-making,  the  noble  comradeship  of  col- 
laboration! Learned  professors  speak  of  collaboration 
and  think  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher.  They  should  re- 
member the  elder  Dumas  and  his  methods  of  manufac- 
turing literature.    His  example  lives  and  thrives. 


Conversation 

The  dark  and  distinguished  playwright  on  the  sofa  was 
deliberately  drifting  into  confidences.  But  the  art  by 
which  he  gained  his  efifects  had  just  a  touch  of  crudity. 
He  forced  the  note  too  briskly  and  took  for  granted  the 
mood  he  should  have  striven  to  create.  The  critic, 
watching  him  from  a  deep  chair,  was  not  surprised. 
The  pla5rwright  was  good-looking  and  firmly  intelli- 
gent. But  all  his  surfaces,  from  his  boots  to  his  cheeks, 
were  too  unfurrowed.  He  had  obviously  been  born  in 
his  particular  Zion  and  all  his  efforts  to  prove  that  he 
was  not  at  ease  in  it  seemed  rather  pointless.  Nor  had 
anyone  asked  him  so  suddenly  to  justify  his  soul.  The 
room  was  a  trifle  chill,  the  afternoon  light  far  from 
mellow,  the  beverage  only  tea.  Other  matters,  too,  on 
which  the  men  agreed  admirably  were  not  lacking. 
But  the  playwright  had,  as  the  critic  observed  with  a 
faint  twinge  of  vicarious  shame,  set  himself  a  definite 
task.  He  crossed  his  legs  and  leaned  back  with  elab- 
orate casualness: 

"What  is  one  to  do?  You  must  either  remain  unper- 
formed or  adopt  the  public's  point  of  view  about  life." 

"Or  what  it  thinks  its  point  of  view,"  the  critic  said. 
But  he  saw  at  once  that  his  mildness  had  prevented  the 

212 


Conversation  213 

words  from  reaching  his  friend's  mind.  The  latter 
went  on:  "And  it  must  be  done  thoroughly.  Half-way 
measures  are  useless.  Unless  your  manager  owns  his 
house  he  can't  keep  a  play  on  that  plays  to  less  than 
eight  thousand  a  week.  The  rentals  are  getting  pro- 
hibitive. Cheaper  and  noisier  things  are  clamoring  to 
go  on.  To  get  even  that  chance  you  must  cultivate 
people  of  all  sorts,  attend  to  the  publicity  work — oth- 
ers always  bungle  it — and  spend  the  greater  part  of 
your  time  on  anything  but  your  job." 

The  critic,  afraid  now  that  he  was  being  cultivated, 
stirred  his  tea.  He  felt  rather  dreary.  He  wanted  to 
say:  "If  it's  so  repulsive,  why  stick  to  it?  You  could 
do  a  dozen  other  things.  One  doesn't  have  to  write 
plays."  But  before  his  small  courage  to  inflict  a  prob- 
ably futile  sting  rose  to  the  point  of  speech,  the  other, 
now  with  a  pseudo-ljnrical  intonation,  cried:  "O  for  a 
hermitage!  Of  course  I  do  my  own,  my  real  work  at 
intervals.  There  are  my  unplayed  plays.  I'll  send  you 
the  new  volume  that  is  about  to  appear." 

The  cat — a  well-bred  and  not  too  obtrusive  animal — 
was  out  of  the  bag.  But  a  little  flame  leaped  up,  as 
it  will  now  and  then,  in  the  critic's  brain.  "I'm  sorry," 
he  said,  "but  I  can't  admit  your  clearly  implicit  plea. 
I  want  to  believe  in  what  you  call  your  real  work,  but 
I  mustn't  let  you  think  it  possible.  You've  written 
The  Adventure  of  Flip  and  Jack  and  Jill.  You  not 
only  built  the  false  and  therefore  immoral  fables,  but 


214  ^rt^  Life  and  the  Theatre 

achieved  the  rancid  emotionalism  of  the  dialogue.  I 
don't  blame  you  for  trying.  Money  tempts  the  best  of 
us.  It  buys  freedom.  I  blame  you  for  succeeding. 
Your  ability  to  succeed  proves  that  you  are  not  a  na- 
tive of  the  regions  from  which,  as  you  think,  the  con- 
dition of  the  theatre  exiles  you.  You  are  at  home  here 
— 2l  skilful  playwright,  and,  privately,  a  cultivated  gen- 
tleman. But  you'll  never  find  your  hermitage.  Since 
it  was  not  in  your  mind  from  the  beginning,  it  exists 
on  neither  sea  nor  land." 

With  fantastic  suddenness  the  conversation  became 
general  and  amid  the  hubbub  and  tinkle  the  blond  and 
energetic  playwright  came  in.  His  voice  was  resonant 
but  monotonous.  It  had  a  little  edge  that  kept  rasping 
some  nerve.  "Ah,  Charlie's  play!  Have  you  seen  it? 
Charming.  Oh,  charming.  But  there  were  mistakes  in 
it  at  first.  He  sent  for  me  during  the  rehearsals. 
'Frank,'  he  said,  'what's  wrong  with  it?'  I  saw  at  once. 
The  girl  came  on  too  soon;  no  preparation.  In  the 
second  place,  the  jokes  would  never  reach  the  stalls. 
They  weren't  led  up  to  nor  repeated."  With  a  kindly 
and  instructive  gesture  he  turned  to  the  critic:  "The 
way  it's  done  in  vaudeville,  you  know.  Now  every- 
thing is  right  and  it's  playing  to  nine  thousand  a  week." 

The  dark  playwright  leaned  forward.  "That's  bully! 
Of  course  it's  a  smaller  house.  Jack  and  Jill  did  nearly 
fourteen  thousand  dollars'  worth  of  business  last  week." 
He  got  up  and  strolled  toward  a  window  while  the 


Conversation  215 

blond  playwright  turned  to  the  critic,  who  felt  the 
bleakness  in  his  bones  that  he  always  does  when  he 
hears  brokers  talk.  He  wanted  to  go  home.  But  those 
glossy  eyes  held  him.  "Haven't  seen  you  since  the  j&rst 
night  of  Millions  Don't  Make  the  Man.  That  didn't 
do  so  well.  I've  got  a  new  thing  going  on  that  might  in- 
terest you.  But  my  real  work's  more  in  your  line. 
Highly  imaginative.  Like  Barrie.  We're  through  with 
the  ugly.  I'll  send  you  the  volume  in  advance  of  pub- 
lication." 

The  critic  sank  deeper  into  his  chair.  The  blond 
plajn?\rright  was  so  sure  of  himself.  But  just  then  he 
seemed  to  withdraw  to  an  inner  contemplation  of  his 
own  assurance,  and  from  farther  down  the  room  came 
the  Voice  which  the  critic  specially  dreaded.  It  was 
not  rivalry  or  envy.  Heaven  knows,  that  made  him 
dread  the  other  critic.  It  was  the  icy  moment  of  terror 
that  he  always  feels  when  unbridgable  chasms  open 
between  his  mind  and  another's.  But  the  Voice  arose: 
"I  admit  the  merits  of  The  Brothers.  But  its  success 
or  failure  will  not  affect  the  development  of  a  native 
school  of  drama.    Tragedy  is  foreign  to  us." 

The  critic  jumped  from  his  chair.  A  lady  regarded 
his  rude  suddenness  deprecatingly.  But  he  was  beyond 
the  reach  of  her  rebuke.  "Then  we  are  less  than  hu- 
man," he  cried,  "or  more.  The  tragic  is  in  art  because 
it  is  in  life!  Why  is  nine-tenths  of  all  great  literature 
shot  through  and  through  with  tragedy?    Because  hu- 


2i6  Art,  Life  and  tKe  Theatre 

man  life  is.  The  very  Fool  in  Shakespeare  has  a  som- 
ber heart,  the  very  grotesques  of  Dickens  throw  a 
shadow  on  the  understanding  mind.  If  tragedy  is  for- 
eign to  us,  then  so  are  birth  and  love  and  death  and  all 
spiritual  conflict,  then  we  are  apes  or  gods  but  not 
men! "  The  critic  gasped.  He  hadn't  meant  to  preach. 
He  was  known  as  a  sinister  "highbrow"  even  so.  He 
smiled  wryly.  "Have  it  your  own  way,"  he  said.  "But 
what  a  world  you're  making:  bevo  instead  of  beer, 
drug-shops  instead  of  taverns,  flirting  instead  of  love, 
shop-work  instead  of  Greek,  business  instead  of  beauty, 
and  Tillie's  Triumphs  instead  of  tragedy!" 

With  cool  precision  the  Voice — it  seemed  a  collective 
Voice — floated  above  the  dead  silence:,  "You  do  not 
understand  the  theatre." 

"And  you,"  retorted  the  critic  wearily,  "understand 
nothing  else." 

He  turned  and,  by  some  magic,  found  his  coai  and 
hat  ready  to  his  hand.  Outside  the  bluish  dark  was 
splashed  by  the  lights  of  Broadway.  The  stars  had  no 
chance  against  that  glitter.  He  walked  in  the  oppo- 
site direction.  He  needed  a  peace  far  from  the  theatre. 
But  near  the  corner  of  Seventh  Avenue  a  round,  com- 
fortable little  figure  of  a  man,  moon-faced  and  pudgy- 
fisted,  rolled  against  him,  and  he  heard,  in  a  moment, 
the  ingratiating  purr  of  a  soft  Irish  intonation:  "Come 
to  see  the  little  play  next  week.  It's  only  a  bit  of  craft. 
But  the  'old  man'  doesn't  let  anything  fail.    It  ought 


Conversation  217 

to  play  to  good  business.  Some  day,  though,  I'm  going 
to  write  a  play  I've  got  in  mind  and  publish  it.  That'll 
be  my  real  work.    I'll  send  you  .  .  ." 

But  the  critic  had  turned  swiftly  and  melted  into  the 
more  solid  darkness  farther  West. 


Marionettes  ^ 

Toward  the  close  of  the  nineteenth  century  children 
and  simple  folk  in  Europe  still  saw  the  puppets  or 
played  with  them  as  unrefiectively  as  their  remotest 
ancestors  had  done.  In  windy  summers  or  russet  au- 
tumns Italians  displayed  their  marionettes  in  amuse- 
ment parks  far  in  the  North  of  Europe.  The  gaudily 
painted  little  stage  was  set  up  in  the  open;  the  benches 
in  front  of  it  were  firmly  fastened  in  the  earth.  The 
marionettes  were  rather  tall  and  their  movements  very 
angular.  But  they  were  all  emperors  or  clowns,  very 
stately  or  full  of  the  broadest  fun,  and  their  robes  had 
once  been  stiff  with  brocade  and  gold.  And  a  child 
who  saw  this  show  with  his  nurse-maid  might  then  go 
home  and  in  his  play-room  snuggle  into  a  curtained  box 
(Punch  and  Judy  Show  or  Kasperletheater),  take  the 
limp  dolls,  and  make  very  vivid  things  of  them  by 
placing  his  index  finger  in  the  head,  his  thumb  and  sec- 
ond finger  into  the  hollow  arms,  and  letting  them  go 
through  a  strange  mixture  of  the  old  folk-plays  and  of 
his  own  day-dreams. 

The  child  and  his  nurse-maid  did  not  have  to  play 
at  make  believe.    To  them  there  existed  no  distinction 

1  The  Book  of  Marionettes.    By  Helen  Haiman  Joseph. 

218 


Marionettes  219 

between  appearance  and  reality,  feigning  and  fact. 
Their  world  had  not  yet  been  divided  between  day  and 
dream.  It  was  of  one  stuff  throughout;  they  were  free 
of  all  its  regions  and  could  pass  from  one  to  another 
without  jar.  Only  by  recalling  or  recovering  that  state 
of  mind  can  we  understand  the  origin  and  persistence 
of  the  puppets.  They  belong  to  the  old,  old  dream 
world  of  myth  and  ritual  and  fairy  lore.  To  those  who 
first  fashioned  them  they  were  not  dolls  but  men  and 
gods,  like  the  winged  bulls  and  sphinxes  that  were  first 
carved  with  hands  and  then  adored.  To  abandon  the 
modern  theatre  to  them,  as  mystical  enthusiasts  would 
have  us  do,  would  be  to  give  up  in  this  art  the  slow 
gains  of  the  critical  intelligence — our  one  weapon 
against  delusion  and  cruelty  and  dread.  But  as  the 
clearest-minded  will  stop  amid  the  bitter  business  of  the 
world  to  read  a  fairy  tale,  so  there  are  moods  when  the 
puppets  may  take  us  back  to  our  own  childhood  and 
to  the  childhood  of  the  race. 

The  history  and  aspect  of  the  puppets  are  both 
charmingly  recorded  by  Mrs.  Joseph  in  her  Book  of 
Marionettes.^  She  writes  with  a  fantastic,  airy  touch 
that  suits  her  subject,  and  her  illustrations  are  chosen 
with  admirable  erudition  and  taste.  Puppets  have  been 
found  in  Thebes  and  in  Attica,  but  time  has  dealt 
roughly  with  them.  They  came  from  the  Orient  in  the 
beginning,  and  of  the  true  folk  marionettes  those  from 

^  The  Book  of  Marionettes.    By  Helen  Haiman  Joseph. 


220  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

the  far  East  are  still  the  best.  The  rounded  marion- 
ettes of  Java  hold  the  dim  dreams  and  terrors  of  their 
makers,  and  the  wooden  puppets  of  Burma  have  an 
eerie  gaiety.  The  Cingalese  puppets  are,  evidently,  of 
an  incomparable  delicacy  and  precision  of  workman- 
ship. They  have  a  sad  and  wondering  gravity  of  ex- 
pression; they  were  made  by  a  folk  that  knew  strange- 
ness to  have  a  beauty  of  its  own.  The  shadow  figures 
of  the  Eastern  islands  are  grotesque  and  wildly  fierce, 
those  of  China  calmer  and  stealthier  in  their  cruelty; 
the  puppet-heads  of  Japan  are  bland,  but  behind  their 
wan  smiles  lurk  fear  and  horror.  All  these  puppets 
were  made  in  faith,  in  rapt  and  dreamy  earnestness, 
and  the  shows  aroused  pity  and  terror. 

The  Christian  centuries  put  the  marionettes  to  more 
definitely  religious  uses.  But  side  by  side  with  these 
the  puppets  served  to  embody  other  figures  of  the  folk 
imagination — Pulcinella  and  Arlecchino,  Punch  and 
Judy,  Kasperle  and  Frau  Ritter  Pantoflius — which  all 
betrayed  the  humor  and  the  realistic  spirit  of  the  West. 
They  persisted  through  later  centuries  and  presented 
popular  legends,  some  recent,  some  of  incredible  an- 
tiquity, and  the  booths  of  the  puppet  shows  were  as 
regular  as  jugglers  and  magicians  at  festivals  and  fairs. 
It  was  at  such  a  booth  that  Goethe  in  his  childhood 
saw  the  puppet  play  of  Doctor  Faust,  which  has  been 
preserved  in  the  version  used  at  Ulm  and  illustrates 
in  its  three  parts,  sub-divided  into  tiny  acts,  the  char- 


Marionettes  22  il 

acter  of  the  later  plays  of  the  puppet  shows.  But  here 
we  are  on  or  very  near  the  dividing  Ime  between  a  more 
ancient  and  more  modern  mood.  The  latter  was  soon 
to  drive  the  puppets  out.  They  do  not  thrive  amid  rea- 
soning and  motivated  actions.  They  and  their  specta- 
tors must  stay  within  the  land  of  dreams. 

Now,  of  course,  no  adult  can  go  quite  naively  to  a 
puppet  show.  It  remains  a  curiosity  and  an  experiment 
in  aesthetic  experience.  Thus  it  is  significant  that  the 
best  of  the  very  few  theatres  devoted  to  puppets  in  the 
world,  the  Marionetten  Theatre  Munchner  Kiinstler,  is 
an  exponent  in  miniature  of  the  subtlest  and  most  ex- 
quisite devices  of  the  modern  craftsmanship  of  the 
stage.  The  marionettes  of  Mrs.  Maurice  Browne  in  the 
Little  Theater  in  Chicago,  those  of  the  Cleveland  Play- 
house, and  of  Mr.  Tony  Sarg  in  New  York  all  share  that 
sophistication,  even  when  they  strive  most  to  approach 
the  simplicity  of  the  old  figures.  Their  makers  do  not 
really  believe  in  them  and  their  audiences  bring  them  no 
creative  faith.  Only  the  marionettes  of  Richard  Tesch- 
ner  of  Vienna  escape  this  difficulty.  He  was  influenced 
by  the  Javanese  shadow  play.  But  his  little  figures  have 
the  faintly  poignant  morbidness  of  all  the  costly  mala- 
dies of  the  modern  soul,  and  one  can  imagine  them  danc- 
ing to  faint  verses  of  Verlaine  or  playing  the  obscurer 
visions  of  Hofmannsthal  or  the  moralities  of  Arthur 
Symons.  But  their  frail  forms  would  wither  in  the 
booths  of  the  market-place. 


222  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

It  is  a  great  pity  that  the  puppets  cannot  serve  some 
of  their  ancient  uses  among  the  many  simple  people 
who  are  necessarily  beyond  the  reach  of  the  modern  art 
of  the  theatre.  In  every  village  of  the  land  there  is  a 
moving-picture  show,  and  the  stories  told  on  the  screen 
by  the  images  of  real  people  in  real  places  are  of  a  con- 
scious and  malignantly  corrupting  falseness.  In  them 
murder  is  represented  as  a  small  affair,  war  as  a  sort 
of  super-football,  getting  the  better  of  one's  neighbor 
as  the  chief  end  of  man.  The  lithe,  brown  men  who 
still  watch  the  grave  faces  of  their  puppet  kings  and 
queens  act  their  old  legends  in  Ceylon  are  far  less  ig- 
nobly deluded.  But  a  realism  of  means,  of  reproduc- 
tion, is  confused  among  us  with  reality  of  content,  and 
one  wonders  whether  the  villagers  of  southern  Ohio  or 
of  the  North  Carolina  mountains  would  not  laugh  in- 
credulously at  a  puppet  show  that  brought  them  a  truth 
of  poetry  and  of  dreams  and  legends.  Perhaps  their 
children  would  yield  themselves  to  the  lure  of  fairy- 
plays  and  thus  undergo  a  cleansing  of  the  imagination. 
The  hope  is  forlorn  as  are  the  puppets  themselves  in 
the  modern  world.  But  their  history  is  full  of  fascina- 
tion and  of  the  infinitely  quaint  grace  expressed  by 
Gounod  in  his  Funeral  March  of  a  Marionette.  With 
grave,  precise,  and  slightly  mincing  steps  the  little  fig- 
ures pass  and  are  lost  in  the  dusk. 


Toward  a  People's  Theatre 

The  rigid  mind  resists  art.  Not,  to  be  sure,  all  the 
arts.  In  music,  where  medium  and  substance  are  iden- 
tical, each  temperament  may  catch  the  echo  of  its  own 
mood.  One  man,  listening  to  the  andante  of  Beetho- 
ven's twenty-third  sonata  (Op.  37),  will  hear  the  aus- 
tere resignation  of  a  great  and  lonely  mind,  another  will 
interpret  that  majesty  and  sweetness  in  a  different  fash- 
ion and  see  the  sky  break  and  show  the  silver  of  an- 
gelic plumage.  But  literature  is  built  upon  ideas  and 
the  drama  projects  ideas  in  terms  of  concrete  living. 
Thus  the  same  people  will  patronize  good  music  and 
flock  to  foolish  plays.  They  are  capable  of  hearing  the 
S3miphonia  Eroica  in  the  afternoon  and  going  in  the 
evening  to  see  the  latest  melodrama  by  Channing  Pol- 
lock or  Elmer  Rice  in  which  a  foreign  villain  assails  the 
virtue  of  American  women  and  is  foiled  by  some  pure 
and  heroic  district  attorney.  Or,  under  the  influence 
of  a  quite  transitory  Idol  of  the  Tribe,  they  are  willing 
to  be  edified  by  a  third-rate  Belgian  actor's  violent 
mouthing  of  the  remote,  white  loveliness  of  Albert  Sa- 
main's  verses.  But  if  Allan  Monkhouse's  Mary  Broome 
were  to  be  brought  from  Grand  Street  to  Broadway 
their  resistance  to  it  would  be  complete  and  final. 

223 


224  Art,  Life  and  tKe  Theatre 

This  rigidness  of  mind  is  neither  voluntary  nor  con- 
scious. It  is  an  instinctive  weapon  of  defense  that  be- 
longs to  definite  groups  in  the  social  and  economic 
order.  The  healthy  and  comfortable  husband,  unless 
he  is  a  born  thinker,  resents  a  criticism  of  marriage; 
the  prosperous  business  man,  criticism  of  the  methods 
of  trade;  the  self-satisfied  father,  criticism  of  parental 
authority  and  wisdom.  The  possessor  resists  change. 
To  him  truth  is  indeed  pragmatic.  How  can  you  ex- 
pect him  to  endure  a  vital  questioning  of  all  the  truths 
that  he  has  found  to  pay  so  well?  If  he  pretends  to 
culture  he  is  willing  to  be  mildly  imaginative,  and 
hence  the  feebler  kind  of  neo-romantic  play  occasion- 
ally interrupts  the  spiritual  sordidness  of  our  theatre. 
He  will  lionize  the  author  of  The  Bluebird  or  of  The 
Faithful.  The  author  of  Man  and  Superman  or  of  The 
Sunken  Bell  would  fare  but  ill.  He  faintly  respects 
the  classic  writers  because  the  possessive  orders  against 
which  they  rebelled  have  long  been  swept  away.  He 
would  be  shocked  and  suspicious  if  you  told  him  that, 
in  a  period  of  reaction,  John  Milton  was  once  pursued 
for  sedition  and  for  having  conspired  against  the  gov- 
ernment like  any  ragged  communist  in  yesterday's  raid 
by  the  Department  of  Justice.  But  he  is  really  neither 
vicious  nor  stupid.  His  possessions  possess  him,  and, 
like  Wagner's  dragon,  he  desires  to  sleep. 

These  are  platitudes.  But  they  are  eternal  and  eter- 
nally forgotten.    Their  acceptance  is  confused  by  iso- 


Toward  a  People's  Theatre  225 

lated  exceptions  of  various  kinds — the  mental  flexibil- 
ity of  a  small  crowd  of  Londoners  in  Shakespeare's 
time,  the  revolt  of  an  occasional  aristocrat  like  Shelley. 
But  such  exceptions  do  not  touch  the  central  fact. 
Art  arises  from  hunger — hunger  for  beauty  or  harmony 
or  truth  or  justice.  Even  when  art  heals  a  dissonance, 
that  dissonance  must  first  have  been  perceived.  How, 
then,  can  it  speak  to  those  who  are  convinced  that  they 
hold  beauty  and  truth  and  justice  in  the  hollow  of  their 
hand?  And  to-day,  as  never  before,  and  in  the  drama 
as  in  no  other  art,  the  great  hunger  which  is  also  the 
great  rebellion  and  the  great  striving  to  remold  the 
world  a  little  nearer  to  the  heart's  desire,  vibrates  in 
every  voice.  Hence  our  theatre  must  seek  another 
audience  than  that  of  the  possessors  merely.  It  is  not 
necessary  to  have  any  romantic  or  sentimental  illu- 
sions about  the  people;  it  is  quite  necessary  to  remem- 
ber that  among  the  possessing  classes  there  are  many 
minds  that  are  deeply  troubled  and  divided.  But  to 
watch  the  audiences  in  our  fashionable  theatres  in  the 
mass  is  to  know  that  here  all  hope  must  be  left  behind. 
These  people  insist  on  being  confirmed  in  all  they  have 
and  are.  It  is  a  popular  error  that  they  are  tired. 
They  are  magnificently  fit  and  fresh.  They  have  dined 
and  need  no  food;  they  possess  all  the  truth  they  need 
and  want  no  art.  What  is  left?  A  thrilling  yarn  of 
offenders  against  their  order  who  are  crushed,  or  clowns, 
or  dancing  girls.    Therefore  the  theatre  must  go  to 


226  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

those  whose  world  is  not  complete  and  perfect,  who 
feel  some  lack  of  beauty  or  justice,  whose  hunger  is 
akin  to  the  hunger  of  the  creative  artist  himself,  who 
do  not  go  to  the  table  of  art  in  an  equal  repletion  oi 
body  and  of  soul. 

This  people's  theatre  will  not  and  must  not  be  a 
huge  place.  It  should  consist  of  many  small  stages  in 
different  streets  and  cities.  Its  accessories  can  be  sim^ 
pie,  since  the  majority  of  its  productions  will  require 
only  ordinary  modern  interiors.  It  should  not  charge 
more  than  one  dollar  and  a  half  for  any  seat  and  it 
need  not,  in  small  houses,  charge  less  than  a  dollar  for 
any.  It  must  begin  with  professional  actors,  but  one 
of  its  chief  aims  should  be  to  find  and  train  gifted  per- 
sons who  shall  be  willing  to  practise  their  beautiful  art 
on  modest  but  regular  salaries  and  hold  this  worthier 
than  the  alternate  affluence  and  squalor  of  the  average 
actor  of  the  commercial  stage.  It  must  have,  above  all, 
excellent  producing  managers.  Several  little  theatres 
among  us  that  might  have  become  starting-points  of  a 
movement  toward  a  folk  theatre  fail  through  the  eccen- 
tricity and  incompetence  of  their  producing  manage- 
ment. The  stages  of  the  People's  Theatre  will  have  no 
room  and  no  time  for  Cubist  decorations  or  the  plays 
of  young  persons  who  have  just  escaped  from  a  campus 
and  mistake  singularity  for  freedom  and  distinction. 

The  productions  at  the  Neighborhood  Playhouse  are 
noteworthy  examples  of  what  a  People's  Theatre  can 


Toward  a  People's  Theatre  227 

do  even  under  untoward  conditions.  The  players  are 
unhappily  all  amateurs.  Yet  when  it  is  considered 
that  these  young  people  work  for  their  livelihood  dur- 
ing the  week,  rehearse  at  night,  and  play  on  Saturday 
and  Sunday,  the  result  is  astonishing.  They  have  the 
sense  of  the  theatre  and  they  have  the  sense  of  life. 
Several  of  them  put  themselves  into  their  parts  with 
extraordinary  sensitiveness  and  flexibility.  And  they 
do  so,  one  suspects,  because  to  them,  far  more  than  to 
the  professional  actor  of  Broadway,  the  form  and  con- 
tent of  the  art  of  the  drama  is  an  immediate  and  a 
native  experience  of  the  mind  and  heart. 


The  Strolling  Players 

The  strolling  players  of  Scarron  have  joined  those  oth- 
ers who  traveled  in  the  car  of  Thespis.  The  wander- 
ing comedian  belongs  to  a  dying  race.  Yet  it  dies  hard. 
The  instinct  of  the  mime  is  strong  and  the  roads  of  the 
earth  are  many.  We  thought  we  had  seen  our  last 
company  of  such  players  suddenly  and  somewhat  for- 
lornly descend  upon  a  Knights  of  Pythias  hall  in  a 
Southern  village  many  years  ago,  when,  behold,  in 
1914,  in  Marion,  Ohio — as  yet  unknown  to  fame — ^we 
came  upon  another  boldly  strutting  through  a  curious 
two-act  play  about  a  Kentucky  colonel,  a  Yankee  vil- 
lain, and  a  wronged  wife.  And  two  years  later,  in  an 
amusement  park  on  the  straggling  outskirts  of  a  larger 
city  of  the  Middle  West,  there  turned  up  a  strange, 
brave  little  troupe  pla5ring,  of  all  things,  Ibsen's  Ghosts, 
and  playing  it  far  from  contemptibly,  before  a  handful 
of  astonished  yokels,  a  group  of  tight-lipped  priests  who 
had  wandered  in  from  a  neighboring  vicarage,  and  a 
large  bat  that  whirred  through  the  barn-like  hall  and 
thudded  softly  against  the  hanging  lamps.  The  play- 
ers slipped  away — ^lonely  S5mibols  of  an  ancient  and 
perishing  mode  of  life  and  art.  There  may  be  still 
other  troupes,  shadowy  and  obscure  survivals.    No  one 

228 


The  Strolling  Players  229 

sets  down  the  story  of  their  doings  or  their  fate.  How 
many  people  know  that,  till  but  the  other  day,  the  old 
show-boats  still  plied  up  and  down  the  Ohio  River? 
The  crew  consisted  of  actors;  the  captain  was  manager 
and  leading  man.  The  boats  contained  a  hall  and  a 
stage,  dropped  anchor  at  remote  landings  and  lit  their 
lights,  and  the  villagers  came  on  board  to  see  old  melo- 
dramas acted  and  to  listen  to  sad  stories  of  the  deaths 
of  kings.  The  late  David  Graham  Phillips  introduced 
a, show-boat  into  his  story  of  Susan  Lenox.  But  his 
account  is  tawdry  and  episodic  and  no  reliable  history 
of  these  strange  craft  exists;  they  have  still  no  Scarron. 
It  is  not  the  moving  picture  show  that  has  given  the 
strolling  players  their  coup  de  grace;  it  is  the  road  com- 
pany. The  members  of  these  companies  are  an5^hing 
but  adventurous  mimes  seeking  the  open  roads  of  a 
gay  world.  They  are  employees.  They  might  as  well 
be  in  shops.  To  them  one-night  stands  in  the  Cana- 
dian Northwest  are  as  stripped  of  essential  adventure 
as  working  on  the  "subway  circuit"  in  Brooklyn  or 
the  Bronx.  Pullman  coaches  connect  the  houses  con- 
trolled by  the  theatrical  trusts  from  Alaska  to  the  Gulf 
of  Mexico  and  the  players  carry  the  echoes  of  last 
year's  Broadway  hits  from  Fargo  to  Mobile.  The 
wildest  of  the  ancient  arts  is  organized  on  a  nation- 
wide business  basis  and  seventy-five  dollars  a  week 
plus  railroad  expenses  paid  from  the  New  York  office 
drains  the  last  drop  of  adventurousness  from  the  play- 


230  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

er's  bones.  Tales  of  stranded  road-companies,  of  shifts 
and  quaint  accidents  are  out  of  date.  All  the  hotels 
serve  grape-fruit  for  breakfast  and  the  same  dishes 
with  the  same  names  in  bad  French  for  dinner.  The 
development  of  civilization,  in  fiat  contradiction  of 
Spencer's  definition,  is  from  variety  to  sameness,  and 
soon  the  dusty  fellow  with  a  collapsible  merry-go-round 
will  be  the  last  representative  of  the  wandering  mimes 
who  were  proud,  shabby,  and  eloquent  upon  the  roads 
to  Babylon  and  in  the  shadow  of  the  great  cathedrals. 
No  wonder  that  romantic  souls  have  been  eager 
somehow  to  revive  the  long  tradition  of  the  traveling 
show.  From  Greenwich  Village  came  last  season  the 
announcement  of  a  Caravan  Theater.  But  no  one 
seems  to  have  summoned  it.  A  similar  message  comes 
from  England  this  season  and  they  who  send  it  may 
have  better  luck.  Mr.  Stuart  Walker's  "Portmanteau 
Theater"  remains,  however,  the  typical  experiment  of 
its  kind.  It,  too,  has  left  the  roads.  But  for  certain 
seasons  it  fared  up  and  down  the  land.  Only,  alas, 
it  did  not  go  to  the  people.  No  square  or  town-hall 
was  suddenly  lifted  into  passion,  poetry,  and  wonder 
because  of  its  coming.  It  was  cannily  summoned  with 
expenses  guaranteed  by  Drama  League  centers  and 
women's  clubs.  It  lacked  robustness,  breadth,  and 
popularity  in  the  nobler  sense.  The  little  plays  were 
tenuous  and  neo-romantic  and  far  more  like  millinery 
than  like  folk-ballads.     Later  on  Mr.  Walker  gave 


The  Strolling  Players  231 

some  superb  productions  and  wrote  one  very  beautiful 
play.  But  he  was  too  aloof  and  also  too  artful  to 
revive  the  tradition  of  the  strolling  players.  If  ever 
we  are  to  have  such  again,  they  must  be  more  like 
Vachel  Lindsay  in  the  days  when  he  chanted  his  rimes 
for  a  supper  and  a  night's  lodging.  They  must  flee 
the  hot  atmosphere  of  the  scented  studio  and  the  "little 
theatre"  and  all  contamination  of  experts  in  the  decora- 
tive arts.  A  platform,  a  passion,  a  burning  thought 
and  youth — these  are  their  only  needs.  Perhaps  some 
day  a  group  of  young  collegians — we  have  seen  and 
known  possible  ones — instead  of  drifting  to  schools  of 
acting  or  "arty"  cliques,  will  take  to  the  road  and  act 
both  Shakespeare  and  Ibsen  on  the  Main  Streets  of 
towns  and  villages  and  redeem  hungry  souls  from  the 
toils  and  graces  of  the  stars  of  the  "Realart,"  the 
"Metro,"  and  the  "Universal." 


Interlude 

The  critic  was  quite  suddenly  charged  with  a  duty. 
He  hates  duties  imposed  from  without.  It  is  hard 
enough  to  meet  the  obligations  dictated  from  within. 
He  was  to  take  to  the  theatre  a  lady  whom  he  had 
barely  met.  He  surveyed  her  coldly.  Mouse-colored 
hair,  bluish-gray  eyes,  a  faintly  agreeable  precision 
and  purity  of  lines,  but  no  curves.  Or,  rather,  all 
curves  were  subdued.  Her  clothes  were  neither  rustic 
nor  innocent.  There  was  a  pallid  but  ordered  decora- 
tive scheme.  A  large  ring  of  turquoise  brought  out  the 
blue  of  her  eyes.  Severity  is  here,  the  critic  reflected, 
partly  a  matter  of  defense;  also  of  deference  to  a  New 
England  ancestry,  a  doctorate,  and  the  authorship  of 
several  learned  pamphlets.  He  was  asked  for  sugges- 
tions and  reminded  that  the  lady's  stay  in  New  York 
was  brief.  He  firmly  named  a  given  evening,  prom- 
ised a  surprise,  and  was  rewarded  by  a  smile  that  was 
meant  to  be  wintry  and  ended  by  being  wistful. 

He  had  his  first  misgiving  when  he  conducted  his 
friend  to  their  seats  in  the  Winter  Garden  on  the  open- 
ing night  of  The  Passing  Show  of  1921.  She  admitted 
that  the  auditorium  was  magnificent  but  glanced  nerv- 
ously at  the  little  glass  ash-receivers  attached  to  the 

1232 


Interlude  233 

backs  of  the  chairs.  An  obese  gentleman  on  her  left 
smoked  an  obese  cigar;  the  lady  with  the  diamond 
necklace  in  front  lit  a  cigarette.  The  critic  became  for 
a  moment  false  to  his  own  harsh  intentions.  "I  hope 
the  smoke  doesn't  bother  you."  Of  course  she  said 
that  it  didn't.  Next  she  glanced  wonderingly  at  the 
bridge  which  ran  from  the  stage  straight  through  the 
audience.  "The  chorus  comes  out  there,"  the  critic 
explained.  He  saw  his  friend's  lips  grow  into  mere 
lines.  Suddenly  he  remembered  that  one  of  her  pam- 
phlets dealt  with  the  classification  of  images  in  Latin 
poetry.    He  took  a  plunge  and  quoted: 

Gratia  cum  Nymphis  geminisque  sororibus  audet 
Ducere  nuda  choros. 

She  laughed  and  there  was  a  richer  alto  tone  in  the 
depth  of  that  laughter  than  he  had  expected. 

She  hadn't  seen  the  recent  Broadway  successes  and 
the  parodies  bewildered  her  a  little.  The  critic  also 
knew  that  her  spiritual  antennae  quivered  perceptibly 
at  the  bare  knees  of  the  chorus.  Nevertheless  she  ad- 
mitted— discreet  conversation  was  easy  here — that 
there  was  something  exhilarating  in  the  play  of  light 
and  color  and  rh5rthm.  "The  rh3^hmic  movement  of 
the  lightly  draped  human  body  singly  or  in  groups," 
the  critic  reminded  her,  "is  not  only  the  oldest  but  the 
mother  of  all  the  arts."    She  looked  at  him  with  grave 


234  '^^^f  -^^/^  ^^^  ^^^  Theatre 

wonder.  "I've  made  that  very  statement."  "Very 
well,  here  is  your  academic  maxim  come  to  life."  Just 
then  the  lights  grew  dim  and  the  chorus,  carrying  small, 
duskily  glowing  balloons,  tripped  across  the  bridge  out 
into  the  audience.  The  lady  watched  the  girls  closely 
and  almost  with  a  quiver.  Then  she  whispered,  "I 
suppose  the  artifice  saves  it.  They're  like  girls  in  a 
picture.  hnyNdiy  it's  lovely."  The  critic  would  have 
put  it  differently.    But  he  was  well  content. 

Only  the  chief  comedian,  he  saw  clearly,  repelled 
her.  A  hard  disdain  came  into  her  eyes — something 
aloof  and  feudal.  She  was  building  a  wall  of  glass 
about  her  nerves.  The  critic  crashed  through.  "Ah, 
yes,"  he  said,  "Howard  has  a  monstrously  Semitic  nose 
and,  apparently,  a  forehead  of  brass.  But  remember 
the  clown  must  hit  the  fancy  of  the  populace.  We're 
not  in  the  Watteau  garden  described  by  Pater;  How- 
ard is  no  Pierrot  lunaire.  This  is  New  York.  How- 
ard's Yiddish  jokes  offend  you.  But  you  see,  the 
descendants  of  the  Back  Bay  families  run  no  theatres — 
neither  the  Guild  which  you  so  delicately  approve  nor 
the  Winter  Garden  which  you  are  almost  ready  to  en- 
dure. This  rude  farceur  and  Max  Reinhardt  of  whom 
the  cultured  patter  and  the  divine  Sarah  whom  they 
glory  to  have  seen  all  belong  to  the  same  tribe.  How- 
ard is,  at  least,  effective.  As  a  trombone,  you  think? 
The  Harlequin  doesn't  play  the  horns  of  Elfland."  She 
turned  to  the  critic  with  a  disarming  smile.    "I  suppose 


Interlude  235 

lie  is  funny."    "Funny  and,  as  he  should  be,  vulgar. 
He  wants  to  reach  the  profanum  vulgus." 

During  the  second  part  of  the  entertainment  the 
learned  lady  did  not  speak.  Her  pupils  expanded;  her 
features  softened  and  glowed.  All  her  life  she  had  been 
taken  only  to  the  more  arid  among  the  "better  things." 
Intently  she  watched  the  magic  melting  of  one  ex- 
quisitely conventionalized  background  into  another  and 
watched  Cleveland  Bronner  and  Ingrid  Solfeng  dancing 
a  vizualization  of  symbolic  dreams.  Here  a  new  art 
was  revealed  to  her,  an  art  she  had  known  only  from 
the  frozen  gestures  on  some  crumbling  frieze.  It  was 
allied  to  music,  but  less  intricate  and  more  primitive — 
an  art  of  expression  divinely  perfect  yet  wholly  natural. 
Thus  would  we  all  dance  if  we  could  and  dared  and 
had  the  beauty  and  strength  of  body  and  were  not  the 
crippled  slaves  of  routine  and  ugliness.  Thus  would 
we  all,  intoxicated  by  our  own  fleeting  but  immortal 
rhythms,  throw  off  "the  heavy  and  the  weary  weight  of 
all  this  unintelligible  world."  And  now  the  critic's 
guest  gave  a  little  thrilled  gasp  when  in  the  Firefly  bal- 
let the  innumerable  chorus  surged  in  wild  rhythmic 
lines  about  Mr.  Bronner  and  a  hundred  limbs  stream- 
ing through  the  changeful  lights  built  up  an  altitude  of 
pure  motion  like  the  fortissimo  of  a  great  orchestra. 
And  she  smiled  and  even  swayed  gently  when,  in  later 
scenes,  two  less  poetic  and  imaginative  dancers  created 
with  their  dry  but  inimitable  nimbleness  the  moods  of 


236  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

ordinary  pleasure  and  liberation  that  we  meet  upon 
our  dusty  road. 

She  insisted  on  walking  to  her  hotel.  All  her  de- 
fenses had  broken  down.  A  lock  of  hair  tumbled  from 
under  her  hat  and  streamed  in  the  wind.  She  said 
good-night  with  a  strange  swaying  forward  of  her  body. 
The  lines  had  become  curves.  She  chanted  under  her 
breath  as  she  went  "Gratia  cum  Nymphis." 


Oasis 

The  last  week  had  been  hard  to  bear.  It  had  brought 
The  Man  in  the  Making,  a  burly  play  for  hard-headed 
business  men;  it  had  brought  Wait  Till  We're  Mar- 
ried, which  dealt  in  lightning-like  stage  conversions  and 
ended  on  a  smile;  it  had  brought  Mr.  Edward  Childs 
Carpenter's  tepid  Pot  Luck,  with  glimpses  of  talent 
carefully  curbed  for  the  box-office.  One  felt,  therefore, 
quite  in  one's  accustomed  element  when  a  stout  gentle- 
man whose  diamond  stickpin  was  as  noisy  as  his  voice 
asked  in  the  vestibule  of  the  Ambassador  Theater: 
"Music  by  Schubert,  eh?  Which  is  it,  Jake  or  Lee? 
Never  knew  those  fellows  went  in  for  composing." 
Then  one  went  in  and  the  curtain  rose  and  there — 
despite  a  hundred  things  to  rasp  the  fastidious  and 
those  who  wisely  or  unwisely  hold  themselves  aloof 
from  the  arts  that  please  the  people — there  was  old 
Vienna,  the  city  of  Gluck,  of  Mozart,  of  Beethoven,  a 
city  that  seemed  not  only  to  lend  a  home  to  genius 
but  to  give  that  genius  a  touch  of  divine  felicity  and 
serenity;  there,  somewhat  in  his  manner  as  he  lived, 
was  Franz  Schubert. 

The  operetta  named  Blossom  Time  and  presented  in 
a  new  Broadway  theatre  was,  of  course,  the  famous 

2Z7 


238  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

Drei  Mddelhaus,  which,  after  a  resounding  success  in 
Europe,  had  reached  the  Irving  Place  Theater  in  the 
winter  of  191 8.  Its  performance  by  the  German  stock 
company  there  was  shabby  to  the  eye  and  not  impor- 
tant musically.  But  a  breath  of  poetry  and  pathos,  of 
earnestness  and  desiderium  passed  through  it  which 
was  sought  in  vain  amid  the  magnificent  mountings  and 
admirable  voices  at  the  Ambassador. 

Professional  devotees  of  music — and  devotees  of 
music  are  apt  to  be  a  little  professional — would  not  be 
pleased,  one  saw  at  once,  with  the  whole  scheme  of 
Blossom  Time.  They  might  merely  disdain  the  act  of 
building  a  play  around  the  life  of  Franz  Schubert.  But 
to  trick  out  that  play  with  Schubert's  songs,  to  ring  all 
possible  changes  on  the  everlasting  Standchen,  to  use 
the  great  melody  from  the  Unfinished  Symphony  quite 
as  the  leit-motif  and  enveloping  tune  is  used  in  the 
cheapest  music  shows!  Yes,  it  was  barbarous.  And 
the  American  production  added  new  atrocities  to  the 
old.  The  tempo  of  the  loveliest  of  the  Wiener  Walzer 
was  shamelessly  accelerated — "jazzed  up"  is  the  better 
expression — and,  at  the  end  of  the  second  act,  the  mel- 
ody from  the  D-minor  was  suddenly  dovetailed  into 
that  of  Ich  schnitt  es  gern  in  jede  Rinde  ein,  which  is 
probably  the  feeblest,  though  one  of  the  most  popular 
of  the  four  hundred  songs.  It  need  only  be  added  that 
the  Ave  Maria  was  used  as  a  "number"  called  Lonely 
Hearts,  and  that  in  the  midst  of  a  musical  pattern 


Oasis  239 

hopelessly  at  variance  with  it  we  seemed  to  detect  sev- 
eral measures  of  the  exquisite  Forelle.  There  was 
nothing  to  set  off  against  these  things  except  the  fact 
that  the  Military  March  was  played  with  the  nicest  re- 
gard for  Schubert's  intention.  To  which  praise  our 
more  terrible  musical  friends  at  once  replied:  Yes,  but 
his  intention  in  this  instance  was  quite  unmusical  and 
popular  and  unfortunately  happens  not  to  interest  us 
at  all. 

Very  well.  But  when,  on  leaving  the  theatre,  we 
heard  the  usher  call  out:  "All  the  hits  of  the  show  at 
forty  cents  apiece! "  and  saw  the  honest  bourgeois  with 
still  glowing  faces  crowd  forward  to  buy  "the  hits  of 
the  show,"  we  felt  certain  that  the  American  producers 
of  the  Drei  Mddelhaus  had  done  a  good  deed— vital, 
beautiful,  beneficent.  It  is  easy  and  lends  you  an  air 
of  pleasing  originality  and  saves  you  from  the  reproach 
of  priggishness  if,  having  just  come  from  Mengelberg, 
you  say:  "Ah,  yes,  I  find  rag-time  most  interesting. 
It's  an  original  contribution  to  music.  Irving  Berlin 
is  a  very  clever  chap."  It  is  easy  and  rather  disgust- 
ing. Out  in  the  land  beside  a  hundred  thousand  pianos 
and  phonographs  the  young  gather  in  the  evening.  And 
among  these  young  people  are  also  students  and  espe- 
cially the  students  of  the  great  State  universities.  And 
the  pianos  tinkle  and  the  phonographs  croak  "When  the 
midnight  shoo-shoo  leaves  for  Alabam' "  or  "Honey 
Boy,  I  hate  to  see  you  leavin' "  and  the  hits  from  the 


240  Art  J  Life  and  ifie  Theatre 

latest  Broadway  successes  by  Mr.  Otto  Harbach  or  Mr. 
Silvio  Hein  and,  at  most  and  best,  some  sugary,  rhetori- 
cal, fundamentally  soulless  bit  from  an  Italian  opera. 
But  suppose  Blossom  Time  achieves  the  sweeping  suc- 
cess which  it  promised  to  achieve  and  in  cottages  and 
fraternity  houses  from  coast  to  coast  the  pianos  and 
phonographs  play  the  Wiener  Walzer !  Listen  to  it  with 
your  inner  ear  in  its  original  tempo  as  the  words  glide 
past  the  eye: 

Und  unter  bluhendem  Flieder 

Mit  duftendem  Mieder, 

Die  Eine,  die  Feine,  die  meine  muss  sein! 

What  soft  gaiety  through  which  breaks  the  eternal  sad- 
ness of  the  soul,  what  infinite  grace,  how  spiritual  a 
rh5rthm,  what  yearning,  what  delight!  Yes,  we  insist 
that  this  time,  if  not  before,  the  Messrs.  Shubert 
showed  themselves  public  benefactors  and  wiped  out  a 
multitude  of  their  quite  unquestionable  sins. 

And  so  at  the  risk  of  seeming  incorrigibly  barbarous 
we  express  the  final  hope  that  Blossom  Time  will  be 
followed  by  a  Beethoven  operetta  called  Adelaide,  and 
by  one  woven  of  the  songs  of  Robert  Schumann.  The 
critics  of  music  may  sneer.  But  if  phonograph  records 
of  Mondnacht  and  Friihlingsnacht  and  Der  Kranke  and 
Der  Wanderer  were  played  in  every  Main  Street 
"home"  and  every  lonely  farmhouse,  what  should  we 
care  for  the  words  of  critics?  Think  of  the  delight 
that  would  be  spread  and  the  souls  that  would  be  saved. 


Underworld 

American  literature  is  said  to  be  looking  up.  Dis- 
counting the  wilder  claims  and  prophecies,  one  may 
gladly  admit  a  vigorous  stir  in  poetry  and  in  criticism. 
If  the  production  of  sound  fiction,  novels  that  are  both 
creative  and  true,  is  still  small,  one  can  at  least  dis- 
miss all  anxiety  for  this  branch  of  literary  art.  No 
American  novel  that  has  distinction  or  promise  need 
go  begging.  The  publishers  yearn  and  pray  for  such 
manuscripts  and  will  leave  their  offices  in  search  of 
them.  A  different  story  must  be  told  of  the  drama.  If 
an  American  pla5nvright  of  the  caliber  of,  let  us  say, 
Dreiser  or  Hergesheimer,  the  Strindberg-Hauptmann 
or  the  Donnay-Schnitzler  type  were  to  appear,  he 
would  not  perhaps  be  mute;  he  would  assuredly  be 
inglorious. 

He  would,  quite  naturally,  come  to  New  York  to  see 
the  managers.  He  would  find  them  heavily  guarded  by 
underlings  and  excessively  elusive.  He  would  be  told 
to  leave  his  "script"  and  given  a  perfunctory  assurance 
that  it  would  be  examined.  Then  an  empty  silence 
would  fall  upon  him.  He  would  seek  to  break  this 
silence  by  telephoning  or  by  repeating  his  call  at  the 

341 


242  Art,  Life  and  tHe  Theatre 

manager's  office.  In  vain.  Publishers  can  be  reasoned 
with,  since  they  can  be  seen.  Managers  melt  into  thia 
air.  Our  American  dramatist,  presumably  young,  would 
sink  into  a  kind  of  limbo  of  the  spirit — a  gray  and  for- 
lorn region.  Recalling  the  glow  of  creation  and  the 
deep  urgency  of  his  ambition,  he  would  seek  to  find 
other  roads  to  the  theatre.  He  would  be  aware  of  the 
fact  that  two  or  three  dramatic  critics  in  America  spend 
their  strength  doing  battle  for  precisely  the  kind  of  play 
he  has  written.  To  these  he  will  now  address  himself. 
He  will  ask  George  Jean  Nathan  or  even  the  humble 
writer  of  these  words  to  read  his  manuscript  and  will 
be  bitterly  disappointed  by  the  result.  Yet  the  critic 
is  quite  helpless.  How  is  he  to  know  that  this  particu- 
lar play  is  a  masterpiece?  He  must  either  read  all 
manuscript  plays  that  come  to  him  or  none.  Since 
life  itself  forbids  the  former  course  and  since  discrim- 
ination would  be  both  unjust  and  futile,  he  chooses  the 
latter.  He  does  so  the  more  calmly  as  he  knows  his 
influence  with  managers  to  be  almost  wholly  limited  to 
suggesting  the  kind  of  thing  they  already  want.  Mr. 
J.  D.  Williams's  production  of  Eugene  O'Neil's  Beyond 
the  Horizon  offers  a  solitary  exception.  But  O'Neil's 
one-act  plays  had  previously  been  given  a  hearing 
through  the  Provincetown  Players,  and  profited  by  the 
circumstance  that  Mr.  Nathan  prints  one-act  plays  in 
the  Smart  Set.  To  Mr.  Arthur  Hopkins  and  to  the 
Theatre  Guild  our  stage  owes  inestimable  benefits.  The 


Underworld  243 

production  of  a  single  seriously  good  play  of  native 
origin  was  not  until  recently  among  them. 

Our  young  dramatist,  shivering  in  his  hall  bed-room, 
will  now  remember  as  a  last  resort  that  playwrights 
and  players  have  often  worked  together.  He  will  seek 
out  prominent  actors  and  actresses.  If  by  virtue  of 
social  adroitness,  a  gift  for  flattery,  and  an  ingratiating 
manner — qualities  likely  to  be  his  in  inverse  ratio  to 
his  talent  and  nobility  of  purpose — ^he  succeeds  in  inter- 
viewing "stars,"  he  will  find,  first,  that  they  are  com- 
monly "owned"  by  managers  quite  as  baseball  players 
are  and  have  to  play  in  the  plays  provided,  and,  sec- 
ondly, that  they  themselves  are  not  looking  for  good 
plays,  but  for  grateful  and  preposterously  showy  parts. 
This  point  they  will  make  clear  to  him  with  a  gigantic 
and  unblushing  simplicity  of  mind. 

In  these  fruitless  efforts  our  dramatist  will  have 
spent  at  least  six  months.  A  dullness  will  have  fallen 
upon  his  spirit;  his  fastidiousness  and  sensitiveness 
will  show  rents  and  callouses.  In  his  rooming-house, 
at  restaurants,  on  Broadway  itself,  in  the  reception 
rooms  of  managers,  he  hears  interminable  talk  concern- 
ing the  art  and  business  by  which  plays  are  "gotten 
on."  A  tall,  youngish  man  is  encouraging.  He  is 
about  to  have  a  play  produced  by  a  new  manager.  It 
took  him  eight  years.  An  elderly  person  with  a  moist 
sputter  and  a  crumpled  face  is  bleak  on  the  whole  sub- 
ject.   Years  ago  he  was  co-author  of  a  successful 


244  Art,  Life  and  the  Theatre 

farce.  Now  he  broods  bitterly  over  a  trunkful  of  un- 
produced  plays.  Our  young  dramatist  shudders,  but 
he  listens.  He  has  nothing  else  to  do.  "You've  got 
to  give  the  managers  what  they  want."  "Yes,  but  what 
do  they  want?"  The  feeble  talk  eddies  back  and  forth. 
Somebody  says  in  a  rough,  tired,  oracular  voice:  "Alf. 
Stone's  secretary  once  said  to  me,  says  he:  'What  the 
boss  wants  is  melodramas  to  make  people  die  of  fright 
or  bedroom  farces  to  make  'em  die  laughin'.' "  Our 
dramatist  happens  to  come  upon  another  group.  Here 
the  talk  is  of  the  gorgeous  profits  of  the  gilded  hacks, 
of  the  fabulous  fees  paid  by  the  great  film  corporations 
for  scenarios  and  "movie  rights."  "Yes,"  some  one 
says,  "  'is  all  right.  But  there's  no  use  submitting  sce- 
narios. They  steal  'em.  You  got  to  get  next."  That 
phrase  throbs  in  our  dramatist's  aching  head.  It  sums 
up  his  situation.  He  has  spent  his  years  on  the  noblest 
of  the  arts,  not  on  the  art  of  "getting  next."  But  con- 
cerning his  art  he  has  not  heard,  a  syllable  spoken.  He 
has  slipped  into  an  underworld  of  spiritual  prostitution. 
These  people  watch  the  plays  with  the  largest  box-office 
receipts.  These  they  imitate.  Then  they  fawn  and 
cajole  and  treat  underlings  to  luncheon  and  wait  weary 
hours  in  managers'  offices  to  "get  next."  Swiftly  our 
dramatist  walks  to  the  office  of  the  manager  who  has 
had  his  play  for  the  past  five  weeks.  He  demands  his 
manuscript.  A  young  woman  with  rosy  nails  and  bril- 
liantined  hair  fetches  it  languidly  from  an  inner  sane- 


Underworld  245 

tuary.    No  interest  has  been  shown.    No  report  com- 
municated.   He  has  not  "gotten  next." 

This  account  is  no  fanciful  one.  It  is  based  gn  hard 
facts.  It  may  be  replied  that  we  have  no  American 
dramatists  of  the  nobler  kind.  But  how  are  we  to  tell? 
It  is  certain  that  a  young  Ibsen  or  Hauptmann  or  Shaw 
would  meet  in  New  York  to-day  the  fate  described  and 
would  withdraw  in  just  and  austere  wrath  to  his  native 
province.  Those  that  remain  and  sink  into  the  under- 
world of  the  theatre  and  at  last  succeed  on  its  terms 
are  not  they  for  whom  we  are  waiting  or  whom  our 
drama  needs. 


,L 


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RETURN 


COLLEGE  LIBRARY,  UCLA 


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